Droid, the most hyped Android phone to date - even Google promoted it on its home page today - is finally available to buy in Verizon Wireless stores.

More than 100 people queued at midnight outside a midtown Manhattan store to be among the first members of the public to get their hands on one.

I’ve been lucky enough to have one on loan for more than a week now, so here’s my assessment after the jump of whether it has been worth the wait and queues.

The Good - The Droid is well built and engineered, it has a heft to it that many other smartphones lack. The screen is taller than the iPhone’s and has a higher resolution. The speaker is loud and the best I’ve experienced on a phone - I’ve used it as a desktop internet radio! The browser is excellent - I prefer it to the iPhone’s - and the increased resolution allows you to see more of the page. But there is only single-tap to zoom, rather than multi-touch. The camera is 5 megapixels, better than the 3.2 megapixels on the iPhone 3GS or Samsung Moment, and it has an LED flash. Quality is still obviously below that of a simple point-and-shoot camera, which tends to be at least 8 megapixels with optical rather than the Droid’s digital zoom. Android 2.0 incorporates better apps and improved functionality - such as an integrated social address book that includes Facebook status. Google Navigation is a killer app. I love the way I can just speak a name like “Navigate to Brandy Ho’s restaurant in the Castro” and it will get it immediately, providing voiced turn-by-turn directions and tracking the route with updated satellite images and street views. The number of useful Android apps grows by the day - Adobe just released a free Photoshop one today - and my current favourites include Google Sky (a compass-guided map of the stars), Listen (a Google Labs podcast finder), Pandora radio, Skype, Swift (a Twitter client), Qik ( live video streaming) and Audioboo (mobile podcasting).

The Bad - The Droid’s battery barely gets me through the day. Its processor is slow at 550Mhz compared to the 600MHz of the 3GS and the 1GHz of future Android devices. However, I have not experienced any noticeable lag so far and it has an ultra-fast graphics processor. The screen smudges easily and could use a protective coating. The interface is basic three-screen Android and cannot compare with the many-panelled iPhone or with Android devices with overlays such as Motoblur and HTC Sense.

The Ugly - The Droid features a slider keyboard I find hard to use. The ledge at the bottom of the phone and a large directional pad on the right means I have to stretch my right thumb to use the keypad. This is awkward and a strain over time. The phone itself is heavy and has a blocky design only its mother or an ultra-geek could love.

Wait in line or wait for better? - The Droid has many appealing features, but the design of the keyboard spoils it for me - why buy a slider, when you have to spend all of your time typing on the touch-screen’s virtual keyboard because of its inadequacies? A non-slider version of the Droid would be very appealing - lighter and sleeker. Anyone looking to buy an Android phone in the US should also take a look at Sprint’s HTC Hero and Samsung Moment, T-Mobile’s Samsung Behold II, Motorola Cliq and HTC myTouch  and Verizon’s HTC Eris. Here are some good comparison charts.

The iPhone 3GS is still the king, but I plan to have a foot in both camps - carrying my iPod touch with my new Android phone, which is the Droid for now, but could be an Android version of the HTC HD2 or  the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 by early next year.

Tags: android, apple, Droid, google, htc, iphone, Motorola, samsung, Verizon Wireless

November 6, 2009 10:24pm in Hardware, Mobile, Software | Comment