Motorola Droid Cell Phone Review

Multimedia & E-mail

The Droid is only average as a music and video player. The Droid plays WMA, AAC, MP3, WAV, and OGG-format music files. It also plays MPEG4 and WMV videos quite well. We were happy to see that the phone comes with a 16 GB microSD memory card. This card fits into a little slot next to the battery. Unfortunately, you have to remove the back of the phone to get at the card, but most users won’t find that too much of a problem.

To get music into your Droid, you plug it into your computer with the included MicroUSB cable and drag and drop your music onto the Droid. There is no auto-synching as there is with iTunes, and there is also no way we could find to create playlists. Once you have your music and videos on the Droid it plays them quite well. However, the Android operating system needs better support for audio and video.

The Droid handles Gmail, Facebook, Microsoft Exchange, and other POP/IMAP e-mail accounts. The first time you turn on the Droid, a setup wizard guides you through the setup. You can sign into your existing Google account or you can create a new Google account. Set up is easy. Google, Facebook, and Exchange contacts with the same first and last name all appear as one in the address book. Your contact’s photos can also be grabbed from Facebook.

One thing to be aware of is that the entire phone seems to rely on your Gmail account. When we tried to remove the Gmail account that we initially set up, it required a complete reset of the phone. So choose the Gmail account that you want to use very carefully.

The Droid also supports WiFi, SMS, and MMS. In fact, its messaging systems are excellent.

Our only complaints were that Gmail winds up it its own inbox, but all our other email accounts share an inbox and that our Exchange calendar did not seem to have full functionality.

Although Facebook contacts merge easily with your Droid address book, we couldn’t find a way to use Facebook’s IM or email. Although the phone supports Google Talk out of the box, it doesn’t support AIM, Twitter, Yahoo, or Live Messenger. However we found Apps in the Android App Market that can fill much of this functionality.

The Android Market can be accessed right from the phone itself. Although the number of Apps cannot compare to the iTunes App store, the Market is constantly growing. We found almost all the apps that we use every day on the iPhone were already available.