Motorola Droid Cell Phone Review

Phoning, Surfing & GPS

The Droid runs Android 2.0 on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor which results in a speedy device. In fact, combined with the capable Verizon 3G network, the Droid often left the iPhone in the dust. We were traveling during our tests. At one point, our plane was delayed and we needed to get the time and gate of our connecting flight. Upon landing we fired up the Droid and the iPhone. Before we got off the plane the Droid gave us the information we needed while the iPhone was still struggling to redraw the webpage on AT&T’s EDGE network. This scene would have made a great commercial for Verizon and the Droid.

We encountered the same speedy responses when launching applications, playing games, and surfing the web.

Voice calls on the Droid were not perfect. They were sometimes a bit of muffled, but not enough to be terribly problematic. We tried the Droid from one end of the country to the other, and thanks to the Verizon 3G network, our calls were always completed. The speaker on the Droid is louder than most and we really appreciated that when making calls as well as when playing music.

The battery life of the Droid was good compared to many other smart phones that we’ve tried. You will probably be charging it up every evening, but for the most part, in normal use, it lasted the entire day. However, if you plan on playing a lot of music or games, you will want to take the charger with you.

The Droid worked well with all the Bluetooth headsets that we tried, however you cannot do any voice commands like voice dialing or voice search through a Bluetooth headset. We don’t understand why the Droid has this limitation and it may be a deal-breaker for some.

The main screen of the Droid is shown in Figure 11. As you can see, the functions that you use a lot can be placed on the main page. At the bottom of the page is a gray bar that can be dragged up to reveal more pages of applications which can be downloaded from the Android App Market.

Figure 11: The Droid main screen.

We found that some of the Android functions were somewhat hidden. For instance, to delete an application you have to go Settings, then Application, then Manage Applications. Then you have to find the application and click on Uninstall. Cut and paste and a few other functions, also require too much thinking and too many clicks.

The Droid is the best phone that we have tested for surfing the web. As much as we disliked the touch pad for getting in the way of our keyboard typing, we loved it for surfing the web. It provided an easy way to scroll down web pages and make link selections.

The Droid supports most JavaScript and DHTML. However, it does not support Flash. That said, it drew most web pages very well and quite quickly.

Although text on the Droid renders slightly smaller than it does on the iPhone, if you have good eyes and/or good glasses, you can read the entire webpage without horizontal scrolling. You can’t pinch and spread your fingers on the Droid except in certain applications. However, you can zoom by touching the zoom icon that appears on the bottom of the screen. Although this is a slight inconvenience, it did not really interfere with the Droid’s excellent surfing experience.

Of course, the Droid is optimized for use with Google and Google applications. We especially like the Google voice search. Just say what you are looking for and Google will find it for you.

The Droid also comes with Google Maps Navigation. This provides free turn-by-turn spoken driving directions. It even has a simplified large icon interface that you can use in your car. We found the Droid’s directions to be excellent.

The powerful Droid speakers came in handy when using it as a GPS device in the car. In fact, with the optional car mount, we felt that the Droid would do well as a GPS, which we certainly cannot say for the iPhone.