My time with the Droid

There has been a lot of hype around the Droid phone from Verizon and with a few of my friends getting one and not sharing any impressions I had to go and check it out. I spent about half an hour playing with it: It’s cool, but not impressive. Sticking with the iPhone 3GS.

Here is my initial impression: the keyboard is too small to be far more useful than an on screen one. The web browser is impressive, but zooming in to read the content is painfully slow. One thing that did surprise me was the collection of apps, it doesn’t look like anything I have on the iPhone would be difficult to replace with the Droid and Android 2.0 marketplace. The other impressive thing – camera. Absolutely amazing. Ton of features but still sloooooooow.

Biggest disappointment: GPS. The GPS detected me about 6 blocks (over a mile) away from where I actually was. The device was not as snappy as expected. The picture album left quite a bit to be desired, even though the device is far more feature packed than the iPhone in nearly every area.

In my opinion, Droid might be the best smartphone that isn’t an iPhone. But as much as it pains me to admit this, and give Apple more kudos or money, the iPhone simplicity and smoothness wins. While I wish I had better 3G, the Droid requires extra $ to enable Exchange 2007 access and there is no tethering. So yeah, better 3G but still the same dirty telco tricks that will make this yet another device that’s a slave to it’s carrier.