Motorola Droid 2 Cell Phone Review

Keyboard and Controls

The Droid 2 has a 3.7" TFT (480 x 854) capacitive touch screen. The screen is clear and text looks crisp and supports multi-touch, and you will be happy with this Droid’s screen. That is, unless you put it next to an iPhone 4’s Retina display or the AMOLED screens of Samsung’s Galaxy phones. These other phones have better, clearer screens, but the screen on the Droid 2 is quite adequate.

As seen in Figure 4, the Droid screen takes up much of the front of the phone. Around the screen is a black border, and on the top of that border is the earpiece with the Motorola name below it. At the bottom of that border are four touch keys marked with white icons which remain at the bottom of the screen at all times, and these icons illuminate when the phone is turned on. Although the position of these has changed from the original Droid, their functions are the same: the Menu Key, Home Key, Back Key, and Search Key.

Figure 4: The Droid touch keys

The microphone which on the original Droid was located under these touch keys is now located on the bottom of the phone, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: The bottom of the Droid 2

Motorola is given points for listening to all of us reviewers who gave the keyboard on the first Droid bad marks. It is obvious that they have made improvements in the keyboard. As shown in Figure 6, the four-way directional key pad which made the keyboard difficult to type on is now gone. Kudos to Motorola for still including small navigational keys and an OK key on the right of the keyboard. While some users will never use them, many will find them useful for choosing menu items without having to accurately touch a small menu item with a large finger.

Because of the elimination of the four-way key pad, the new keyboard on the Droid 2 has larger keys which are easier to use. The keys have a nice slightly rounded top, giving a soft, but adequate tactile response when pressed. The only drawback that we saw to the new keyboard is that the top row is quite close to the edge of the display. No problem for smaller hands, but if you have chubby fingers, you will want to try this keyboard out before you buy.

Figure 6: The Droid 2 keyboard

The Droid 2 keyboard also has some nice additions. There is now a key with a microphone which brings up the voice input screen with a single press, and also a useful back button and a larger ALT key.

As with other Android phones, the voice input and voice search work very well. Voice recognition is amazingly accurate.

The on-screen keyboard is also quite workable. It also includes Swype, a method of typing on the screen that allows you to drag your finger across the keys rather than pressing each one.