by Leonard Accardi -- May 29th 2010 -- Fort Lauderdale, FL
Call quality with Verizon is not as good as it was with ATT in my home in urban Fort Lauderdale near the beach. Only 2 or 3 of the 4 reception bars, but that is probably not the fault of the Droid. All volumes are good and loud. The Droid is small, but heavy for its size. The on screen keyboard keys are too tiny for my fingers and I make many mistakes trying to input text. Entries must be made with the skin of your fingertips. Using the tips of your fingernails does not work. The slide out keyboard also has very tiny keys that are very close together and is awkward to use.
The best feature by far is the voice input. It is almost always correct and avoids having to make manual keyboard entries. The web browsing is excellent and the navigation (GPS) is superb. On a recent two week trip to Las Vegas, I didn't even use my Magellan Road Mate 1412 GPS. The Droid did the job better, and with voice entries for locations and points of interest. My Magellan is now obsolete.
One bad thing about the Droid is that there is no audio beep every five minutes to let me know that I missed a call or have a voice mail, as there was with my previous Motorola RAZR and KRZR phones. A missed call can go unnoticed for hours. There is no one touch speed dial, and it takes four or five swipes or clicks to make a call, even to favorite contacts. Also, each time you access your voice mail, you must enter your pin. This is a nuisance. Importing contacts to the Droid was a hassle, but was possible after several visits to the web. The phone is only a minor feature of this web oriented machine.
I love the fact that different mp3 songs can be used as ring tones for each contact, and mp3's could be loaded into the large capacity 16 Gig removable micro SD card supplied with the phone, without having to download them from the web. My yahoo email was also easy to setup and use. I have not used the camera much, but the pictures seem dark when the flash does not go off. The one video that I took was also dark. I probably need to learn more about how to use the camera/video recorder. To me the camera was fast and easy to use, and not as bad as some of the prior reviews I read. My guess is that Android 2.1 probably fixed the previous problems. There are many apps available, but judging by quantity is misleading. Most of the thousands available are useless, but the fifty or so that I did find useful work well.
So far, after 6 weeks, I have only downloaded free apps, and have no need for any of the pay ones. I am not into games and have none on my Droid. The user replaceable battery drains fairly quickly, but not unreasonably, when using the net a lot. The Droid has many features that are not covered in the user manual which needs to be expanded.
Motorola Droid User Rating
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