The Motorola DROID Review Mix!

 

The Motorola DROID Review Mix! - iSmashPhone iPhone Blog

This is a summary of reviews from NYT, WSJ, Gizmodo, and Engadget with my comments on each topic.

Screen

The screen is the biggest and brightest I have experienced on a handheld.  Text and graphics pop from the screen, and the best feature is its automatic brightness adjustment based on ambient light.  The phone is easily visible at all times, even in direct sunlight.

Keyboard

I agree with other reviews – the keyboard is marginal, particularly for people (like me) with large hands and fingers.  I type with my thumb, and I miss the auto-correct I had with my WinMobile phones.  Auto capitalization does work with the keyboard.  I *do* like the keyboard layout which is optimized for e-mail and web use.  The ‘@’ sign, ‘/’, and most commonly used punctuation don’t require use of Shift or Fn.
I’m not too keen on the screen keyboard, but Motorola needs to enable auto-correct with the slide out keyboard.

Camera

It works, it’s 5 megapixels, it integrates with  software, and it supports applications such as barcode reader, which I like have found very useful.

Operating System

Android 2.0 is very impressive.  I have used Windows Mobile since the 2003 release in various form factors (flip phone, QWERTY no touch, touch screen with keyboard, touch screen only). 

 

The biggest feature I need to address is the full ActiveSync with Exchange/Outlook.  The base ActiveSync support works with e-mail, contacts, and calendar (Corporate Calendar on the Droid).  However, in my testing, e-mail and contact sync appear to work fine, but I’m debugging an authentication issue with Calendar and using Google’s Outlook Calendar Sync as a work around.  Also, Outlook/Exchange Tasks and Notes are not supported, which makes me sad. 

Android integration with Google is very, very good, but still not complete.  I would like to see full mobile support for all Google Apps.

 

 

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