My Motorola Droid Review

Reasons to Get the Motorola Droid Instead of the iPhone

• The Droid has a keyboard, the iPhone doesn't. Typing emails or search queries on the iPhone's touchscreen is the most obnoxious experience on earth if you have fingers bigger than that of a 10 year old. Maybe that's just my opinion, though.
• If you're a Google fan, this is a no-brainer. Everything about this phone was practically designed for the Google aficionado. Google search, Gmail, Google Translate, Google Gesture Search, Google Talk, Google Buzz and everything in between will complement this phone. Since I'm a "PC" and not a "Mac," there's no force on earth that would ever get me to use the Safari browser.
• If you're a Verizon fan, the fact that the Droid is running exclusively on Verizon is incentive enough to either switch to the Droid or to come onboard to Verizon from an inferior service like AT&T, Cingular or Sprint ;)
• You can replace the Motorola Droid's battery, whereas the iPhone doesn't make this possible for some inhumane reason.
• The apps are comparable to the iPhone's apps, so the whole argument of getting the iPhone for its apps is a mute point. Browse the Android Market to see what's available for the Motorola Droid, and you'll see exactly what I mean. All of your favorites are there, too: Google Goggles, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Barcode Scanner, Shazam, Pandora, you name it. Even the "camera flash lantern" and all of those other gimmicky ones, too.
• Apps are unrestricted on the Android Market unlike the iPhone's apps, which have to get approved by Apple Inc. and are frequent victims of rejection.
• The Droid is a Motorola phone and Motorola is awesome: ask anyone. Apple makes a solid yet compact phone, but believe me, Motorola really outdid themselves with the Droid.
• The Droid has a better built-in camera on the market than the iPhone's. 5mpx vs. 3mpx is just half the battle. Compare video quality as well, and you'll see that the Droid comes out on top. You really won't need to carry around your pocket-sized Nikon, Sony or Samsung camera anymore when your Droid can handle the task.
• Pinch and expand is now a feature thanks to the March 2010 Droid software upgrade. This was officially the only reason why I favored the iPhone over other smartphones. Now that the feature is standard on the Droid, I'm overjoyed.

What I Truly Love About the Motorola Droid

• The instant messaging system is just awesome. You may have seen the "speech bubble" one on the iPhone, but the Droid's is much better and more linear in my opinion. It looks similarly to having a Gmail account: conversations with individuals are "stacked" together. You can have up to 200 messages total in a saved conversation (once you go over, it deletes the early texts as each new text is sent). Now that I have the Droid with its way of organizing text messages this way, I can't believe how I used to use phones that mish-moshed conversations from different people in one messy pile.
• The keyboard keys aren't too small for my fingers. I rarely ever make a spelling mistake when I text on the Droid. They keys are slightly beveled or blistered, which makes them easier to press.
• The camera takes awesome pictures that no other phone on the market at the moment can compare to. What's even better is the software upgrade from March 2010 that totally overhauled the image viewer - pictures are now "stacked" like a pile of photos and can be sifted through. The camera itself has so much memory included that you'd be hard pressed to run out of space. Droid's video-taking capabilities are equally impressive: videos come out crystal clear!
• I like being notified of new Gmail emails with the blinking green LED light on the cover of the Droid. You can set it to blink every time you get something new in Gmail, which is helpful if you're a small business owner, or if you're simply waiting for important emails to come in. You can also set this light to blink whenever someone sends you a message on Facebook (remember, your Droid will sync with your Facebook account).
• Facebook syncs with the Droid. Therefore, if you add a new contact to your contact list on the phone, it will fetch their Facebook profile picture and information. The profile picture shows up on your screen during incoming calls. I'm a total Facebook junkie, so, this level of synergy is a really cool and helpful feature to me.

iPhone Advantages Over the Motorola Droid

• It's slimmer than the Droid because it doesn't have a keyboard. If the Droid didn't include the keyboard, it's screen portion would be about the same depth of the iPhone.
• The iPhone App Store is bigger than the Android market, but as previously mentioned, the bulk of iPhone apps are pure rubbish and short-term parlor tricks that ultimately waste your phone's memory. I'd rather amuse others with the same apps downloaded to my iPod Touch than have them crowd my phone.
• iPhone's Apps are better. Let's be realistic, they simply are. Here's one fundamental fact: iPhone apps, for the most part, all have that same universal look and feel: they're polished and pleasing to the eye. You'll find that the Droid's apps all look entirely different from each other. There's practically no universality to their fonts, menus, functions or anything else because many different developers have created them using their own methods. While there's a pretty neat voice recorder app for the iPhone, there's a similar one for the Droid; however, it looks and performs like a total hack-job. You'll find alot of this with Droid apps.

What I Don't Like About the Droid

• The "cancel" button can be un-responsive many times. It's the button on the lower left of the front of the Droid. For instance, if you're in an app and want to cancel out of it, you'll have to press the button many times while the operating system struggles to load the previous screen. Another usability issue I first had was that hitting "cancel" will not hang up a phone call, it simply puts the call in the background, allowing you to access the desktop.
• The camera can act annoyingly on occasion. There are actually two ways to take a picture: tap the shutter icon on the screen, or physically press the camera button. The shutter icon is too close to the "cancel" button on the phone, and there have been an unmentionable number of times where I have accidentally pressed "cancel." As for the shutter button itself - you need to get used to pressing and releasing it just right, or it will auto-focus and do nothing. Sometimes, it tends to struggle in low light situations, too.
• Emailing pictures: This must be a network thing and not a Droid thing, but sending a picture from your Droid to an email address is painfully slow. I've tried it several times, and clocked the time to be almost exactly 2 hours for the picture to show up in an email inbox. Pictures I used to send from my LG Dare (also on the Verizon network) to email would simply take a matter of minutes. The Droid's pictures, however, are 8.6" x 6.5" and 300 DPI.

Droid Doesn't

A list of things it simply doesn't do

• Taking screenshots: The Droid doesn't take screenshots or "screen grabs." Why this was never included as a feature is really beyond me - it makes things increasingly frustrating for tutorial writers who would like to include a screen shot of their Droid to publish on the web. It simply can't be done as-is.
• You can't use a stylus: If you're really old school, you won't like the fact that using pen caps or pointing devices simply won't work on the Droid - it only responds to fingertips.