Pros & Cons
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- Best screen we've ever seen.
- Excellent Web browser.
- Very fast and powerful.
- Great battery life.
- First Google Maps Navigation device.
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- Not a great voice phone.
- Physical keyboard is mediocre.
- No easy way to sync with PCs.Watch the Droid by Motorola!
Droid by Motorola (Verizon) Specs
| 802.11x/Band(s): | Yes |
| Bands: | 1900 |
| Bands: | 850 |
| Battery Life (As Tested): | 7 hours 7 minutes |
| Bluetooth: | Yes |
| Camera Flash: | Yes |
| Camera: | Yes |
| Form Factor: | Slider |
| High-Speed Data: | 1xRTT |
| High-Speed Data: | EVDO Rev A |
| Megapixels: | 5 MP |
| Operating System as Tested: | Android OS |
| Phone Capability / Network: | CDMA |
| Physical Keyboard: | Yes |
| Processor Speed: | 600 MHz |
| Screen Details: | 16M-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen |
| Screen Details: | 480-by-854 |
| Screen Size: | 3.7 inches |
| Service Provider: | Verizon Wireless |
| Storage Capacity (as Tested): | 210 MB |
The Droid is a big, industrial, even a little steampunk-looking contraption at 4.56 by 2.36 by .54 inches (HWD) and a hefty 5.96 ounces. The front is a bright, rich 3.7-inch, 854-by-480 LCD capacitive touch screen. Below the huge screen are four light-up, touch-sensitive buttons, and then a bit of a lip with the microphone on it. The back is burgundy soft-touch plastic. The whole effect feels pleasantly expensive, but also rather masculine; it's not androgynous or organic like the
Slide the screen to the right to reveal the first real disappointment, the Droid's keyboard. The QWERTY keys are a little too small, a bit too flat, and a touch too tight to put this in the first rank of keyboards. The Droid offers two decent touch keyboards as well, with word completion and correction. But even though I didn't love the physical keyboard, I was very glad it was there—even a mediocre physical keyboard is better than a touch keyboard, in my view.
Android 2.0, Speed, and Power
The Droid runs Android 2.0, but it's also a "Google Experience" phone. That means it runs the most basic version of Android possible. Google relies on the curiosity and tech-savvy of their customers to turn the phones into what they want to make of them. Motorola and HTC have all done good work personalizing Android and making it a bit cuddlier. But you won't see Motorola's extreme social networking or HTC's full-screen widgets here.
Fortunately, Google got the memo about providing a bit more base functionality. Android 2.0 means Microsoft Exchange support, a more flexible camera app, better software keyboards, better browsing and multitouch, for instance. (You can't "pinch" things, though; for now, multitouch just makes the virtual keyboards more usable.)
The world's first Android 2.0 phone is also the fastest, by a long shot. This is the first Android phone with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, coming in the form of the TI OMAP 3430 chipset. That's an entire generation ahead of the ARM11 chips in all other Android phones. (The iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre also use Cortex-A8s.) I ran four publicly available Android benchmarks. On pure CPU measures, the Droid was about twice as fast as the
The result: really pleasing performance in both built-in and third-party apps. 3D games Hyperspace and Speed Forge played very smoothly, with responsive controls. Web pages scrolled very smoothly. Applications launched with aplomb.
The fast processor also made it more frustrating when programs would occasionally freeze or crash. The sluggish, poorly programmed camera app was the worst perpetrator by far, but I also got frustrated when network issues would hold up a Web page.
Voice Calls and GPS
Like the iPhone, the Droid is not the greatest voice phone. Verizon's excellent network helps cushion the blow here. But calls on the Droid sounded more muffled, compressed, and computer-y, in both directions, than calls on a
The Droid auto-paired to our
Speaking of Car Mode, the Droid is the first phone to come with
Messaging and Social Networking
One of Android 2.0's flagship features is its ability to sync with multiple things at once. In the Droid's case, that means Gmail, Facebook, Microsoft Exchange, and other POP/IMAP e-mail accounts. Your Google, Facebook, and Exchange contacts with the same first and last name all flow together into the address book, and they get their Facebook photo. You can't link contacts by hand, though, the way you can on the
Gmail, everything-else mail, and text messages still appear in different inboxes, though all of your everything-elses all arrive in the same mailbox. (Why does Gmail get special treatment? It's still a Google phone.) You can view Microsoft Office, JPEG, and PDF attachments without a problem and set your accounts to push or pull for e-mail.
Exchange calendars, oddly, appear in their very own "corporate calendar" app separate from the Google calendar app. They're accurate and offer two-way syncing. You can create new meetings and send requests to attendees, but you can't respond to meeting requests from others, which I found odd.
The Droid does social networking better than some phones, but not nearly as well as the Motorola CLIQ. Facebook contacts fold into your contact list, and the phone comes with both a home-screen widget showing your friends' statuses and a decent on-device client for checking and commenting on Wall posts. But Facebook IM and e-mail are entirely missing—there's no way to interact with either, unlike on the CLIQ. There's no MySpace or Twitter built-in, either. Ditto for AIM, Yahoo, or Microsoft Live Messenger; the phone only supports Google Talk. (Fortunately, you can find IM and Twitter apps in the Android Market.)
Multimedia
The Droid makes a stellar music and video player except for one huge problem: it doesn't sync with PCs. Sure, you can plug it in with the included MicroUSB cable and drag and drop your media. But normal, non-geeky people don't want to do that. The freeware
Once you get your music and video on the phone, it looks and sounds great. The Droid played WMA, AAC, MP3, WAV, and even OGG-format music files through wired or Bluetooth headphones, displaying album art. The standard, 3.5-mm headphone jack was very welcome. Full-screen MPEG4 and WMV videos played smoothly, although the phone crashed when it tried to scale down a 720p HD WMV video. The phone comes with a 16 GB microSD memory card that fits into a little slot next to the battery; you store most files on there rather than on the 210 MB or so of internal memory.
The Droid's 5-megapixel camera isn't as good as the competing
Conclusions
The Droid isn't an
Our current Editor's Choice for a smartphone on Verizon, the HTC Imagio, is an excellent device. It's better than the Droid in important ways: it's a better phone, it syncs music with PCs, and it handles Exchange calendars much better. But Verizon has publicly committed to Android in a big way, and the platform is developing a lot more quickly than the staid, slow, and tired Windows Mobile. The
The Droid goes on sale on Nov. 6 for $199.99 with a two-year contract.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Continuous Talk Time: 7 hours, 7 minutes
More Cell Phone Reviews:
Final Thoughts
Droid by Motorola (Verizon)
The Motorola Droid is the future of Verizon Wireless, and the future looks bright.