And Michael Arrington has posted a love letter:
In just a few hours Verizon stores will open and the first customers will get their hands on their very own Droid. [CNet covers the midnight Droid madness last night in Manhattan.]
And I promise you, if you are one of the people waiting in line, you will have a much lower than average amount of letdown. That’s because, in my humble opinion, the Droid is the coolest mobile phone to exist to date. It is as close as we’ve come to the Platonic ideal of a smartphone. Its very existence ensures that the next iPhone will be even better than it otherwise would have been. Competition is good.
Yes, this is an unabashed love letter to the Droid. If you want the dispassionate reviews, we’ve got em. And then some. [Mashable also has a Droid metareview.] That isn’t what this post is about.
This post is about love of technology.
I’ve had one of the devices, a free loaner that I wasn’t ashamed to beg for, for a week now. I’ve assigned it to my Google Voice account and have used it and only it since it arrived.
I have placed it in the car doc [a $30 accessory, you can also buy a $30 home dock; when you insert the Droid an alarm-clock/weather display appears] and have used Google Navigator to get around, shunning my expensive but suddenly dated in-car navigation system. I talk to my Droid. And it talks back to me, guiding me to my destination.
I have installed a dozen apps on my Droid, and all run smoothly in the background. Skype, Yammer, Twitdroid and Google Voice all let me know when something is happening that I need to be aware of. There is no lag when I open these apps. Even when most of them are running at once.
David Pogue starts his review saying we need a noun to describe all the tech-heavy phones being introduced this season. He asked his Twitter followers to suggest one (they wrote a book for him, after all). His favorite from @mentalworkout (their Fear of Flying App is #1 in the iTunes store): app phone.
Now on to Pogue’s review:
For lots of people, these breakthroughs will be irresistible. But the Droid has its weak spots, and some of them are heartbreaking. The big one is polish and simplicity; the Droid just doesn’t have enough. Techies may go nuts over its flexibility, but normal people are in for some floundering. Sometimes the keyboard doesn’t light up when it should. Sometimes the screen image doesn’t rotate when it should.
The camera has an LED flash, which helps at close range at night, but the camera itself is balky and slow to focus and fire. You can record videos (at a high 720 by 480 resolution, although they don’t look any sharper) and upload them to YouTube, but you can’t trim the dead air off the ends first.
The Droid doesn’t work outside the United States, as the iPhone does (for an added fee). There’s no iTunes-like auto-synching software for the Droid, either, so loading music, photos and videos is a drag-and-drop operation.
The Droid’s Web browser is good, but slower than the iPhone’s. And you have to zoom in and out by tapping +/- buttons or double-tapping the screen. That is, you can’t control how much to zoom, so you get far less control (and pleasure) than “pinching and spreading” with two fingers on the iPhone and Palm Pre. Ditto with maps and photos.
The real bummer, though, is the apps. The Android Market may offer 12,000 of them, but the iPhone store has 100,000 — and over all, they seem to be more useful and imaginative.
Nit-picky, but accurate, Pogue’s objections all boil down to, “the masses are sold on iPhone cool.” That’s true in my house, where the pressure is on to buy 2 more. On the Droid-iPhone faceoff Pogue concludes:
…the Droid wins on phone network, customizability, GPS navigation, speaker, physical keyboard, removable battery and openness (free operating system, mostly uncensored app store). The iPhone wins on simplicity, refinement, thinness, design, Web browsing, music/video synching with your computer, accessory ecosystem and quality/quantity of the app store.
Sadly (for this is why I won’t be paying the AT&T termination fee) tethering, for computing with your laptop on-the-go when that Android 2.0 interface just won’t cut it, will cost you $30:
That doubles the cost of the required data plan that sits atop a subscriber’s voice plan, meaning a total of $60 per month for “unlimited” data access on handset or laptop. Mind you, “unlimited” really means 5GB of data per, a total of 10 split between the two $30 plans. Glass ceilings: we hate them.
It could be worse. We could be making and taking calls on one of these…