I’ve been using the Motorola Droid for over a week now and personally, I love it. I find the features, such as the touch screen and the interface, to be somewhat unintuitive to start but easy to grasp. The call quality has been superb, there are times though that answering the phone can be tricky since it involves sliding a finger across the screen. Answering could be problematic if you’re cooking or if your hands are wet. The speaker phone does an excellent job and it doesn’t distort like I’ve experienced with other phones such as the LG 8300, Blackberry Storm, and Blackberry Tour.

The most impressive part about the phone is that it feels like it’s more than a phone, at the same time, not forgetting it’s a phone. Often times with a Blackberry, they served the purpose of being an extension of work flawlessly but lacked keeping my consumer side happy. The application market needs some improvements but there’s definitely worth while apps in it. The process of going from looking –> purchasing –> downloading –> installing –> and finally running is a very fluid transition. Google’s store front ties in to your gmail account (if you have one) and allows you to assign different credit cards and accounts for purchasing. The updating of purchased applications is also very well done. If there’s an update, the phone notifies you and you can start downloading right away.

I do have some complaints and concerns though:

The Motorola Droid’s battery life leaves much to be desired. This is most likely due to the GPS not being “smart” in turning itself on or off based on when an application is needed. With my GPS turned off my phones battery life increased 20%. By lunch time, with as much mucking as I do, my phone would be around 40% to 50%, now it’s at 70%. Part of this probably has to do with the WiFi connectivity too. Having WiFi connectivity on a phone is amazing but it’s also a drain on the battery. I try to be smart about enabling/disabling it which helps to prolong the life of my battery.

My biggest complaint about the phone is it’s lack of Exchange Active-Sync implementation. It was amazing how easy it was to set the phone up on my works Exchange server. It was so that I expected an equally amazing extension of my work be available. This was not the case by any means. Two very basic features were left off the phone. First, there’s no way to directly look up a contact against your global address list while writing an email. The very simple function of forwarding an email to a coworker, who’s email I do not have easily accessible, suddenly becomes nightmarish when I’m mobile. Motorola added the Corporate Lookup app which allows you to look up information against the Global Address List but it’s still a severe chore to take that information and get it to an already created email. The Blackberry, Pre, Window Mobile, and Apple OS do this flawlessly.

Another very simple function that was not added was being able to create a signature for your phone. Often times responding to a user, it’s almost necessary for them to understand that I am mobile and cannot be readily accessible.

Coming from a Blackberry Tour I was excited about the Motorola Droid. As I often tell my coworkers, it tweaks my inner geek. Unfortunately my inner geek also needs to work in order to make money, to continue being a geek. The Motorola Droid doesn’t make this an easy task and unless they start making some improvements I don’t see people willing to jump ship from more solid “work friendly” phones.

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