subject: Motorola Droid is Verizon's best phone, and a worthy competitor to the iPhone [print this page] I wanted an iPhone bad, and finally gave up waiting for it to come to Verizon. Got a Droid and am very happy with it.
The screen is awesome - bigger than an iPhone's and more dense with pixels, so images are very sharp. The colors are great, and the screen is nice and bright. I had a Samsung Rogue for about 10 days. Everyone raved about the Rogue's screen. The Droid's screen blows it away. The touch screen is accurate and responsive, and very intuitive to use. About as good as the iPhone but much better than every other touchscreen phone I've tried and better than a few cameras with touchscreen controls.
The Droid's display is sharp enough and wide enough to view most web pages - including those not specifically formatted for mobile phone browsers. Because of this screen and because of the way that the Android OS implements the browser, surfing the internet is very easy, intuitive, and pleasant. Much less horizontal scrolling/panning. Much better than most phones I've tried, including the Samsung Rogue and Blackberry. The iPhone's browser is also a pleasure to use, but the Droid's screen is better at displaying full web pages.
Email is very well-implemented in the Droid. I was already a Gmail and Google calendar user before getting my Droid, and the level of integration is amazing, thanks to the Google Android OS. But any Android phone will also handle most other popular webmail, like hotmail, and also can sync with Microsoft Outlook and similar programs.
The Droid's call quality is good, and the speakerphone is loud and clear enough to be useful in most places. I get slightly better reception with the Droid than with my previous Verizon phones, especially in places with poor network coverage.
The Droid's built-in Facebook app is good, but is not as full-featured as the iPhone's FB app, which has been around longer and had more time to be improved. Yet, the Droid's FB app is as good as or better than FB access I've seen on most smartphones, including Blackberry and especially the new Samsung Rogue.
One extremely cool thing is you can easily import the contact info from all your Facebook friends into the Droid's contact manager, including their profile photo, email, phone, birthday, etc. Then, from your contact list, you can tap on any of their names and with one touch either call, email, or jump to their FB page. This is very well-implemented and easy to use, and makes the Droid's contact manager highly useful.
The Droid has pretty good voice recognition. I can tap the microphone icon in the upper right corner of the screen and say "Starbucks" and the Droid will show a list of the nearest Starbucks - and then I can pick one and either touch the phone number and Droid will call it, or I can touch the address and Droid will show its location on a map and give me driving directions.
Droid like all Android phones has Google maps built in, including satellite view, and Droid can give you directions (from your current location or any location) just like Google maps on a computer.
What's more, Droid has built-in GPS functionality and can give spoken directions, just like a Garmin GPS. I tried it and it works pretty well.
Loading music and photos onto the Droid is as easy as dragging and dropping files from your computer to a thumb drive. Droid's music player is not as refined as iPod/iPhone, but it is easy to use and works great. If you have an iPod, you probably have lots of music tracks in AAC format. The Droid will play them no problem, as long as they don't have DRM copy protection (and most don't nowadays). The Droid also plays MP3 and other formats.
Motorola Droid is Verizon's best phone, and a worthy competitor to the iPhone
