by Michelle Lentz

Last week I offered a quick first impressions post. Now that I’ve spent some time with the Droid, I’ve tried to write a more in-depth review for the average user.

What’s in the Box?

The Droid has minimalist packaging:

• Droid
• Battery
• USB cable and AC Adapter
• 16 GB microSD card (pre-installed)
• Tiny little Getting Started Guide

Activation was easy and only took a couple of minutes.

Form

It’s flat. Even with the slider, it’s flat. In fact, it’s only a wee bit thicker than my 1^st gen iPhone. The slider seems solid, sliding straight back and forward, without the wiggle I often feel in slider phones, including both the Rogue and the Pre. Instead, this slider snaps rather decidedly into place. The whole phone has an impressive weight to it although it’s only 6 oz; you’re not petrified you’re going to break it.

There is sort of a billboard quality to the phone. The front lets you know it’s both Verizon and Motorola. Those are repeated on the back, with the addition of Google. The back slides off to reveal the battery compartment, and yes, you can replace the battery.  In my own usage, I found the battery lasted about 10-12 hours during a normal day’s use – some GPS, email, phone calls, some internet surfing … On the days when everyone wanted to play with it, the battery not surprisingly drained really fast. You can access a built-in power management widget that allows you to, with one click, turn the brightness down, and toggle on and off wifi, syncing, bluetooth, and location services. Unless I’m outside, I tended to keep the brightness turned down and the bluetooth turned off, just to help save on battery.

I’m adjusting to the keyboard. It’s rather flat and it does have two blank spots. A number of people have remarked to me that they added the directional pad at the cost of a better, wider keyboard. I can’t argue with that, really. Although I have talked to some folks who game on their phone. They’re excited about the directional pad but think it’s quite possibly on the wrong side.

To navigate, I’ve been mostly using the touchscreen and the four flat “light” buttons. I don’t mind those buttons either. Once you adjust to, in particular, heavy usage of both the Back and Menu buttons, you’re set. (The Menu button is also available on the keyboard.) The only thing I don’t like is that, because there is no tactile feedback, it’s hard to find the appropriate button in the dark.

The amazingly shiny touchscreen is really responsive. It attracts fingerprints in the worst way, which drives me crazy. If I buy one, I’ll also be purchasing a screen protector to matte the screen a little and cut back on fingerprints. The screen is a 3.7″ WVGA (480 x 854 pixels) and 16:9 widescreen.

Phone

I had no trouble making calls from my house on the phone. Considering that my home seems to be an AT&T dead zone, this is always a bit of a relief.  I was told the call quality was clear. When calling using Google Voice, the call quality apparently degraded slightly, but not too much.

The phone integrated easily with Google Voice. I had three options: use Google Voice for every call (which I did), have the option with each call, or don’t use it. Every time I placed a call, the little Android robot would appear, informing me the call was being routed through Google Voice. However, Google Voice did not integrate with the SMS. In order to send a text using my Google Voice number, I had to launch the Google Voice app.

I haven’t yet figured out how to add speed dial for particular contacts, but it is possible to add favorites, similar to the iPhone. From Car Home (which I’ll get to later), you can easily say “Call John Doe Mobile” and make a call to Mr. Doe’s mobile phone. I was amazed at how well the voice recognition worked.

Camera and Media

There is a music player that instantly found the songs I had loaded, via USB, from my SD card.  When a song was playing, hitting the Menu button offered several choices, including creating your own ringtone from the song. I did this without hesitation.

The Droid sports a 5 mp camera with a dual-LED flash, activated from the Camera application or by clicking a button on the lower right side of the phone. There are a lot of options available for the camera. I was particularly thrilled with Scene mode, which pretty much offers everything except a setting for Food shots. You can manually control the flash or set it to auto. Additionally, you can control the white balance and add color effects such as sepia and tinting. Finally, there is an option for what I think is geolocation for your photos under the poorly named Store Location. (My first thought was, “What store?”) I’ve been told that it doesn’t shoot very well in low-light, but I haven’t had the opportunity to try. I do know that this could easily replace my need for a pocket camera to use when I don’t want to carry the larger one around.

The video shoots in 30 seconds, 10 minutes, or 30 minute increments (or whenever you manually turn it off). You can easily shoot a low-quality 30 second video to send via MMS or Qik or a high-quality 30 minute video to store on your SD card just by changing a couple of settings. I filmed the 37 second video below and uploaded it directly to YouTube from the Droid. As a note, it will only upload large files such as videos when it has access to a WiFi connection.  This video has been compressed by the YouTube Gods, but it looked really great when viewed on the Droid. This is also not hi-res filming.

After a period of trial and error, I finally found the video player on the Droid. It’s pretty basic and is accessible from the Gallery (video and photos). As opposed to using the built-in player, I installed a free video player application. Both applications let me view, in high quality, the movie I uploaded to the SD card.

Operating System & Features

I don’t know enough about Android in it’s previous incarnations, or Android as a development tool, to speak about the changes in the OS. I do know that Android 2.0 is highly customizable. Like the iPhone, you can have multiple pages or screens to host your icons. Because there’s a built-in pop-up menu, you don’t actually have to use these. I customized mine with the apps I use the most, some bookmarks, and a couple of widgets.

My home screen has a calendar widget that shows my schedule for the day (the above screenshot shows a music widget). Additionally, I have icons for Gmail, Email, Browser, Phone, Contacts, Google Voice, and Messaging. In the top notification bar, I can access Twidroid, a Twitter application.

On the screen to the left, I have a Facebook widget and a Twitter widget (Twidget Lite).  I also have two bookmarks to web pages I access often. On the screen to the right, I have the Google Voice Search widget. I also have the icons for the Marketplace, Evernote (this is a beta app), Car Home, and Messaging. All of these applications, as well as more, can be also accessed from the pop-up slider on each page.  As you can tell, I’ve really sort of “moved in” and customized the phone.

In addition to the slide-out keyboard, there is a virtual keyboard that pops up whenever you tap inside a text box without the physical keyboard pulled. I don’t know if its because the keys are perfectly square or what the reason is, but I type better on this virtual keyboard than I do on the iPhone. I was pretty surprised by that. I usually don’t respond well to virtual keyboards. It also changes orientation, depending on whether you are in portrait or landscape.

Car Home is something that makes no sense until you use it. Basically, it’s to make you potentially less deadly while messing around with your phone while driving.  It lists five large icons (View Map, Navigation, Voice Search, Contacts, and Search) as well as Home. Voice Search lets you search for pretty much anything and I was pretty surprised at its accuracy. The Car Home screen is always available, but turns on by default (or so I understand) when placed in a special, non-included, cradle.

From within Car Home, Navigation launches the rather wonderful Google Maps Navigation, which all but replaces a separate GPS or subscribing to VZW Navigator. It includes turn-by-turn voice navigation and I was blown away by it.  I could even say “Find Pizza” and it would find the pizza joints near my location. It seemed to run about a 1/4 second behind, but still was able to keep up with my “wrong” turns and re-route on the fly. I didn’t notice a painful drain on the battery either.

There are a lot of thoughtful little things incorporated into the Droid:

• A long tap (or hold) on the Home button from anywhere displays a pop-up box with the last 6 applications you accessed. It helps you move easily between things, sort of like Alt-Tab on a PC.
• The @ key on the keyboard is a regular key. You don’t have to hit ALT to access it.
• The virtual keyboard (available in both portrait and landscape) has a .com easily available.
• Briefly holding down the power button lets you quickly put the phone in either silent or airplane mode.
• “Droid.” The default sound for notifications is a robot saying “Droid.” It’s hilarious. It put friends of mine into geekboy heaven.
• Locking and unlocking the phone is as simple as sliding your finger in an arc across the home screen. It’s even sort of fun.

Email, Contacts, & Calendars

Syncing works flawlessly. Because my world is owned by Google, it took no time at all to have my data at my fingertips. The phone instantly synced with my Google account, which included my contacts, calendar, and Gmail. Since Mobile Me has been inconsistent on my iPhone, I enjoyed having a calendar that was accurate and near instantly updated across all devices.  The Facebook application very thoughtfully offers choices regarding syncing. You can sync all your Facebook contacts to your address book, sync only the contacts that exist in both locations, or not sync your Facebook contacts at all. I prefer the second option as I certainly don’t want all the Facebook contacts in my main address book. It’s just too many people.

Email exists in multiple spots: Gmail and Email.  I have several Gmail accounts listed in my Gmail, and my three other IMAP accounts are listed in Email. Within Email, I can view my mail in one combined inbox, which I love. I don’t like that my Gmail and Email can’t all be in the same inbox. I tried adding my Gmail accounts as IMAP, which worked, but I then had no access to Gmail features such as labels.

Enterprise users can also set up Exchange accounts (I hear this is pretty easy) that sync with Email and the Corporate Calendar.

Remember that I’m synching over the air with my Google accounts, and I never once had to sync hardware to hardware. In fact, the only need I had to plug in the USB was to move audio and video onto the SD card. I’m not sure how that works for folks with calendars other than Outlook or Google (such as iCal).

Apps I Found and Needed

There are some things missing from the Android, and luckily, there are free apps to fill in the gaps. As they say, there really is “an app for that.”

• Locale: Allows you set your profile based on where you are, using the GPS.
• Google Voice: This integrates nicely with the phone. However, it does not integrate that nicely with SMS. I’m not sure if there’s something I’m missing or if Google just dropped the ball.
• Linda File Manager: I use this to get an in-depth look at and manage files both on the device and the SD card.
• Video Player: Truthfully, I downloaded a trial of Act 1 Video Player, which retails for 99¢. Video Player, however, is free. I could not find a way to watch videos on the Droid, but with the third-party app, I had no trouble watching the movie I’d pulled onto the SD card.
• Remember the Milk and Evernote. I pay for RTM Pro, which gives me access to the mobile apps, including the Droid. I also swear by Evernote. This particular app is in beta, but it worked really well.
• Twidget Lite: This is a widget that gives you quick and easy access to your Twitter account, including showing the latest and greatest tweet on one of your home screens.
• Twidroid: Assuming I buy a Droid in a week, I’ll probably buy the Pro version of Twidroid ($5).  The free version only supports one Twitter account and I need to maintain several. You can set an icon to display in the Notification bar to keep you apprised of tweets, replies, and/or direct messages.
• Flashlight. No kidding. I used this to put makeup on in the car while my husband is driving. It’s as basic as you can get, but quite helpful.

I also installed some fun apps, including Shop Savvy, Where, Zagat nru, and Google SkyMap. I was able to find comparable replacements for everything I use on the iPhone. For instance, I replaced UrbanSpoon with both Where and Zagats.

Minor Issues

As of right now, I only have a few minor complaints with the Droid. I found some things, such as mounting the phone to my computer via USB, to be non-intuitive to the new Android user. I also found some of the menus to be hidden. There seems to be inconsistency across what appears via the Menu button and what appears via long tap. The Settings menus are still a bit techie, and I think some non-techies will find them a bit intimidating.  I’m also not a big fan of the fingerprint-attracting surface, but that’s easily fixed by a screen protector.  Finally, I’m a bit disappointed with the Google Voice integration – or rather, the lack of Google Voice SMS integration – but I’m hoping that’s user error and not a Google Voice problem.

Multitouch? Everyone seems fixated on this. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t using multitouch as I sped through things on the Droid. I double-tapped to zoom in and out on web pages without even thinking about it and easily used the touchscreen and virtual keyboard. But if you’re insistent, here’s what I sort of know. Android 2.0 does support multi-touch, but so far, nothing has implemented it. Rumor has it that the Droid hardware also supports it, and the GSM/European version has supposedly been seen in the wild with multi-touch.

The Droid goes on sale Friday at your local Verizon store for $199 with a 2-year contract. You’ll need data and all the rest to support it. I may be picking one up as soon as I can afford it. Of course, sometime this week I should also get my hands on some other new phones, so who knows what I might buy …

Android screenshots graciously provided by Bryan at The Gadgeteer.

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

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