As another part of our sweet tax refund, I decided that it was time to upgrade my phone to a proper smart phone. Several of my friends have already acquired Droids, and I’ve been able to play around with it a bit. It’s pretty nice — responsive, looks beautiful, and has a lot of great features.

The Droid runs Google’s Android operating system, a variant of Linux. This particular operating system is also used on a number of other phones, including the Touch, G1, Nexus One, and Eris. The great part about this is that the marketplace is shared amongst all of those phones, so there is a much larger user base to develop applications for them.

Overall, I really like the phone — there are a couple of things that I dislike, but no deal breakers, and many are things that could be fixed with firmware upgrades.

This review is broken up into two parts, due to length. Part 1will focus on the native Droid features such as the hardware, standard apps, and connectivity.

Part 2 will focus on third party apps, Droid tricks, and how to make your own custom ringtones, notifications, and alarms with a free third-party-app (it’s AWESOME).

The Interface

The phone has a slide out physical keyboard, but also does the on-screen keyboard (like the iPhone). I actually find it easier to use the on-screen keyboard, mostly because I have big hands so I always end up making more mistakes with the physical keys. Using the on-screen keyboard forces me to type slower so I make more deliberate keystrokes. It does feature word completion, which is handy, and it even learns from words you’ve typed before.

The touch screen display allows for “Gestures” such as “flicking”, and “panning”, allowing you to intuitively navigate through the displays. A massive contact list can be negotiated quickly by flicking your finger up — the contacts just whizz by! Nothing terribly innovative here, though – the iPhone and other comparable phones all support this sort of interface; Still, it’s nice to see that it is implemented well.

There are four buttons on the main front panel, one power switch that you press to get it out of standby mode, and the volume control on the side of the phone.

The buttons are kind of weird. You don’t press them all the way in the way you would the buttons on a typical cell phone, but they ARE real buttons. Knowing exactly how to press the buttons is taking some getting used to — particularly the power button. This may be the only aspect of the Droid that I really dislike — I wish the buttons were a little bit easier to operate.

By default, the Droid uses “haptic feedback”, a fancy way of saying “it briefly vibrates when you push a button or touch an icon on the screen.” I think the iPods and iPhones do this as well, it seems to be a pretty common feature. It’s very useful, particularly when you’re typing using the on-screen keyboard.

As many other modern hand-held devices have, the Droid also features an accelerometer that allows the display to rotate from portrait to landscape mode, and vice versa.

Contacts List

The contacts, while quickly sliding through the list

The first thing I noticed about the Contacts List was that it pulled all of my Google account contacts *AND* my Facebook contacts into one massive contact list. I still have mixed feelings about this. It would be nice to have some of my Facebook friends in my contacts list, but including all of them just seems to make the signal to noise ratio too low.

Fortunately, due to the touch screen gestures I mentioned earlier, it’s not that hard to work with a large number of contacts. You can flick the screen, or just start panning it until the slider appears on the right side — the slider will allow you to rapidly scroll through the list. Contacts are broken up alphabetically (by first or last name, depending on what letter is first), and as you scroll through the list, it displays the current letter you’re viewing statically in the center of the screen — very handy for fast scrolling.

The Droid also groups your contacts — so if you have more than one contact with the same name or email address, it will group those contacts together into one entry.  I have not run into a situation where it has incorrectly combined two contact records yet, so I’m not completely sure how it knows to combine two records. Any commentary on that from other Droid users?

Making Calls

The phone dialler

It may sound funny, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how you make a phone call with the Droid. There is no physical dialing interface, but there is a clearly marked “Phone” app on your Droid desktop. Launch that application and it presents you with a large-buttoned dialing interface. Very nice.

Alternately, you can call someone directly from your contacts list, or from a google maps lookup (ie. if you look up “Papa John’s”, it gives you the option to call the phone number that is associated with that maps location).

One thing I did notice about the phone was that it sounds AWESOME. Something about the earpiece on this phone just sounds much higher in fidelity from previous phones I’ve owned. It may seem as though this is a PDA first and a phone second, Motorola definitely did NOT skimp on the phone technlogy. Great job there.

Google Maps

The Google Maps app comes pre-loaded as well. Mine required an update when I first ran it, which downloaded very quickly.

Google maps, viewing Richmond

If you’ve ever used Google Maps on the computer, there should be no surprises here. The phone version works exactly the same, and I would venture to say even better. You can click the “search” button to search for any address, place, or person, and it will search in the current area you are viewing!

For example, if I move the map so that it shows Richmond, and I search “Kroger” it will show me a pin on the map where our Kroger is, but none other! The search results will give you all of the information Google has on record for that search result. You can even add it directly to your contacts, which I found to be an easy way to add businesses to my contacts list.

Google Maps also supports multi-touch, which is really cool. You can use two fingers to “pinch” or “spread” the map, which causes it to zoom in and out, respectively. Double-tapping your finger on a location will also zoom in, and there are separate zoom in / out controls as well.

You can “Star” locations, which puts a star icon on the map. I haven’t explored the possibilities with this yet, but I imagine that if you tap on a star it will shortcut you to that location.

The Google Maps app also works directly with the GPS Navigation system (free!), and in well-covered areas you can get turn by turn directions using street view. Very win.

The Google Apps Suite apps

an empty email in gmail

Since the Android OS was developed by Google, one should not be surprised by its tight integration with Google’s web platform. Natively, the Droid supports gMail and gCalendar. Picasa, which was acquired by Google a few years ago, has a web-based photo sharing service similar to FlickR; you can upload photos taken with the Droid directly to it. Youtube is supported in full effect as well, which is really nice — you can take videos with your Droid then upload them directly to Youtube.

Viewing a gMail account on the Droid is very slimmed down – you basically see just your inbox, and nothing else. You can do anything with those messages that you can do with gMail on the computer.

The one thing that was missing that somewhat disappoints me is gDocs — I was hoping for at LEAST the ability to read gDocs — not necessarily type into them, that’d be a pain in the butt.

I checked the third party marketplace, but didn’t find anything promising there for this. Perhaps in the future.

Web Browsing

The web browser in landscape mode.

Web browser, portrait mode

Web Browsing is acceptably fast. The only downside is that flash does not appear to be supported, right now. The web browser DOES, on the other hand, support multiple “windows”, or tabs, simultaneously. An unexpected yet useful feature, if you want to have multiple sites open at once.

The Droid can use location aware browsing for some Google services, such as Google search. The Google homepage features links directly to web content for physical locations that are near your current location, weather, news, etc. It’s an interesting integration of the real world and Internet, although I hesitate to call it “augmented reality.”

Web browser viewing Amazon's mobile site

Some large-scale websites, such as Amazon and eBay, have mobile versions that are heavily stripped down, showing essentially the most important features (search, recommendations, and basic navigation) and leaving off everything else. Aesthetically, it doesn’t look as good, but really, the ease of the interface greatly outweighs any aesthetic sacrifices.

Websites that have not optimized for mobile users, such as my website, this blog, or IU East (we’ll do a mobile version really soon, I promise!) are rendered beautifully, as they were originally intended, in a full-screen, standards-compliant browser. The web browser really gets to show off how amazingly good the screen resolution is on this device. People with poor vision or trouble reading small text may find this problematic; the Droid does offer zoom features for web pages, though.

I have a feeling that websites offering a mobile version will become more standard, in the coming years.

Camera

Pic in a pic!

One feature I do like about the camera on the Droid is that you can’t take pictures without launching the camera app. No more pocket photos!

The shutter button is located on the side of the device, so that when you hold it in landscape mode, it’s where in a natural place; where one would expect the shutter button to be on a camera.

The camera app is really nice — it does both photos and videos and autofocuses with a flash. I don’t know that I would call the video “HD”, but it’s definitely very crisp for being taken with a cell phone. The sound quality is far better than other camera phones I’ve owned.

Photos can be uploaded to gMail, Picasa, Facebook, and as a Pix Message. No FlickR integration, unfortunately. Videos can be uploaded to gMail, Youtube, Facebook and a Flix Message — although I attempted to email a short (20 sec) video yesterday and ran into problems; it was too big.

Youtube will probably be the best selection, if you don’t mind the video being open to the rest of the world. There are currently no good options available for putting it up online to be visible by “friends only” other than Facebook.

Speed & Network

The Droid is a 3G device, meaning that if you are in an area with 3G coverage (most densely populated areas will likely have it), you get faster data transfer speeds, comparable to wireless internet.

The Droid ALSO supports Wi-Fi internet as well, so if you are in the inside of a building where you don’t get cell phone reception, you can always log onto the local wireless network. I do not know whether or not it supports VPN connections, but I’ll find out tomorrow! (My office has no cell reception and our wireless network requires a VPN logon.)

Battery Life & Charging

One of the biggest reservations I had before purchasing was that everyone said the battery life was ridiculously short. Considering the size and power it has, a short battery life doesn’t seem unreasonable (ie. the phone is about as powerful, in every way, as a laptop from about 8 years ago). My friends have all said that they can make it through the whole day with a reasonable amount of use, and just charge it every night.

I haven’t had a full week of work with the Droid yet, but so far, it hasn’t been that bad. The screen chews up more battery life than sound does — so if you’re playing music (via the internal music player or through the Pandora app), let the screen kick off and it’ll last longer. It does warn you when your battery life is approaching low, before it becomes critically low, which is a nice feature.

The nice thing about charging is that unlike my old iPod, you can still use the Droid while it’s charging! The included USB plug allows you to plug the Droid directly into your laptop / desktop and charge it, but still use the phone at the same time. Very cool. A converter is also included so that you can use that same USB cable to plug your phone directly into the wall, if a computer is not available.

The battery doesn’t seem unreasonably short or anything, but it seems that the development team recognized that it will need to be charged frequently and made charging as painless as possible. Good job there.

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