The Motorola Droid is the first truly lust-worthy smartphone from Verizon Wireless, and it puts all other Google Android phones to shame. Motorola may have stinted on a few of the basics in its quest for mind-blowing smartphone power. But the first Android 2.0 phone is definitely the most advanced and exciting device connecting to Verizon today.
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The Droid is a big, industrial, even a little steampunk-looking contraption at 4.56 by 2.36 by .54 inches (HWD) and a hefty 5.96 ounces. The front is a bright, rich 3.7-inch, 854-by-480 LCD capacitive touch screen. Below the huge screen are four light-up, touch-sensitive buttons, and then a bit of a lip with the microphone on it. The back is burgundy soft-touch plastic. The whole effect feels pleasantly expensive, but also rather masculine; it’s not androgynous or organic like the iPhone.
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Slide the screen to the right to reveal the first real disappointment, the Droid’s keyboard. The QWERTY keys are a little too small, a bit too flat, and a touch too tight to put this in the first rank of keyboards. The Droid offers two decent touch keyboards as well, with word completion and correction. But even though I didn’t love the physical keyboard, I was very glad it was there—even a mediocre physical keyboard is better than a touch keyboard, in my view.

The Droid’s massive screen is a game-changer, because it shows the full width of desktop Web pages. Everything looks better and more readable on this screen—e-mails, calendar items, icons, whatever. But the real pleasure is turning the phone sideways and loading up a Web page. (Just like the iPhone, the Droid’s screen rotates when you turn it.) Web pages no longer need horizontal scrolling, and if you have relatively sharp eyes, you can read everything. Double-tapping zooms easily, and scrolling around pages feels fluid. The Droid supports most JavaScript and DHTML, but not Flash or a few kinds of controls; for instance, I couldn’t slide the slider on our home page (but I could make the carousel of columnists turn.)

Android 2.0, Speed, and Power
The Droid runs Android 2.0, but it’s also a “Google Experience” phone. That means it runs the most basic version of Android possible. Google relies on the curiosity and tech-savvy of their customers to turn the phones into what they want to make of them. Motorola and HTC have all done good work personalizing Android and making it a bit cuddlier. But you won’t see Motorola’s extreme social networking or HTC’s full-screen widgets here.

Fortunately, Google got the memo about providing a bit more base functionality. Android 2.0 means Microsoft Exchange support, a more flexible camera app, better software keyboards, better browsing and multitouch, for instance. (You can’t “pinch” things, though; for now, multitouch just makes the virtual keyboards more usable.)

The world’s first Android 2.0 phone is also the fastest, by a long shot. This is the first Android phone with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, coming in the form of the TI OMAP 3430 chipset. That’s an entire generation ahead of the ARM11 chips in all other Android phones. (The iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre also use Cortex-A8s.) I ran four publicly available Android benchmarks. On pure CPU measures, the Droid was about twice as fast as the Samsung Moment, which until now was the fastest Android phone available. The Droid was faster on memory and file system tests, too. Even network speed tests came out faster, because a faster processor can handle more data through the modem.

The result: really pleasing performance in both built-in and third-party apps. 3D games Hyperspace and Speed Forge played very smoothly, with responsive controls. Web pages scrolled very smoothly. Applications launched with aplomb.

The fast processor also made it more frustrating when programs would occasionally freeze or crash. The sluggish, poorly programmed camera app was the worst perpetrator by far, but I also got frustrated when network issues would hold up a Web page.

Voice Calls and GPS
Like the iPhone, the Droid is not the greatest voice phone. Verizon’s excellent network helps cushion the blow here. But calls on the Droid sounded more muffled, compressed, and computer-y, in both directions, than calls on a BlackBerry Curve 8330. Call quality was still acceptable, but I wouldn’t call it good. The phone’s speaker was loud at top volume, and distorted slightly when listening to a very loud sound source. The speakerphone, a long bar on the back, was of average volume and quality. The Droid got an amazing 7 hours, 7 minutes of talk time, one of the longest results we’ve ever seen for a Verizon Wireless phone.

The Droid auto-paired to our Plantronics Voyager Pro and Altec Lansing BackBeat mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets without a problem. But although calls, music, and video sounded clear, you can’t do any voice commands—voice dialing or voice search—through a Bluetooth headset. You have to speak your commands directly into the microphone or a wired headset. That’s a pity for a device with a dedicated Car Mode.

Speaking of Car Mode, the Droid is the first phone to come with Google Maps Navigation, which provides free, turn-by-turn, spoken driving directions. Car Mode is a simplified interface that gives you a few large icons to poke at in your car; Verizon will sell a car mount for the Droid, as well. The combination may make the Droid the best GPS phone on the market. We’ll have a full review of Google’s new free driving app next week, but in a brief test, it found my location accurately and gave loud prompts

Droid by Motorola (Verizon Wireless) – Full Review – Reviews by PC Magazine.