Mike Hudack

First impressions of the Droid

Last night at about 6:30 I left the office to trek over to Tribeca and meet Rosie Siman from Cake Group. Rosie and Cake are the PR firm for Motorola Droid. Rosie was really nice — she was willing to come by my office to drop a Droid — but I figured I’d come to her instead. She was, after all, giving me the hottest phone out there for free.

I’d like to quickly thank Rosie, Cake Group and Motorola for the phone. You guys are awesome! When I called to activate the phone the Verizon sales guy couldn’t believe I had a Droid… he was like “How’d you get it so early? I can’t even get one yet!” He told me that he’d just spent $400 to fly a friend into town to hang out with him, but that he was going to drop another bunch of cash on a Droid. He was like “I’m going to have to keep my debit card at home for a week after I do this. But I’ve got to do it.”

I unpacked the phone in the elevator. People were looking at me a bit funny — can’t you do that later? — but I couldn’t wait. My initial impressions were good. The phone’s a bit bigger than an iPhone and a bit clunkier. But the build quality feels really solid. It feels good in your hands.

This, I think, is the bottom line: the iPhone is infinitely more elegant than the Droid, but the Droid just works better. It syncs with Exchange better. It syncs with Facebook better (well, the iPhone doesn’t do this at all). The browser is as good or better. The network is infinitely better. The screen is at least twice as good as the iPhone’s screen, at least qualitatively. Sound quality is amazingly good. But the iPhone is much more elegant as a complete package. The Droid has better component pieces, the iPhone puts those components together better.

That’s the trade off. No dropped calls. Awesome audio quality. Better reliability in general. But none of the slickness of the iPhone. There are lots of little annoyances (clicking a phone number in the Location field of an appointment tries to map the number on Google Maps… it doesn’t work).

This is a trade-off I’m more than willing to make, but the same won’t be true for everybody.

Here are a few bullet points in favor of the Droid:

This thing is super fast. The CPU is obviously very fast, and the Verizon network is like a breath of fresh air. Blip’s homepage loads in about a second, compared with a few seconds on an iPhone with AT&T (if you manage to get a real 3G signal on the iPhone in the first place).
I’ve only had it for about twelve hours, but I can already say that it’s very reliable. Calls don’t get dropped even in elevators. I can walk through the entire office — past all the places that were previously off-limits because the iPhone would consistently drop at that point — and still be on the phone.
The audio quality is phenomenal. When I replaced my stock iPhone earbuds with Ultimate Ears monitors I felt like I was listening to my music for the first time. Moving the Ultimate Ears from iPhone to Droid gave me the same sensation — the audio quality is just great.
Widgets are cool. I like having the weather displayed automatically on my Home Screen.
Having the physical keyboard is nice, although it’s not a great keyboard. It’s better than not having one, though.
The Android browser is at least as good as Mobile Safari.
The screen is gorgeous, packing in about twice as many pixels as the iPhone. It’s bright and detailed and beautiful.
The virtual keyboard is just as good as the iPhone keyboard.
Syncing with Exchange works infinitely better than on the iPhone. It actually properly syncs, and reliably. The iPhone (and this could be because of AT&T) would always be a couple hours behind, and falsely claim I didn’t have any new messages. I don’t expect any of that with the Droid on Verizon.
Google apps — and other Android apps — often seem just a bit cooler than their equivalents on the iPhone. There’s just a bit more functionality.

This is not to say there aren’t drawbacks:

You’ll immediately miss a lot of little features from the iPhone. Things like touching the top of the screen to scroll to the top of a message or Web page. The lack of this polish is, frankly, weird. I’m guessing that future point releases of Android will address these issues. I hope so.
There is a feeling at various places that Android 2.0 was rushed out. Clicking a phone number in the Location field of an Appointment should dial the number, not try to map the phone number. Again, I’m hoping these annoyances are fixed in subsequent point releases.
The music player isn’t nearly as good as the iPhone’s player. There’s no way to browse music by genre, for example. It does what it does well, though. It just needs some more features and views. I’m hoping that these come soon.
There’s no equivalent to iTunes to sync the phone with your computer. You only notice this when it comes to getting music onto the Droid. You have to hook it up with USB and use it like an external hard drive. Drag your music from Finder onto the Droid and it’s picked up. I’d prefer to have an application that’s aware of music as music — instead of as files — to sync. I can live with this, though.
The engineers are clearly in charge at Google (as opposed to the UI guys being in charge at Apple). You can do a lot more with Android than you can in iPhone OS, but it’s harder to figure out how to do things. Maybe just because there’s so much more you can customize. It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to put widgets on my home screen. In the Android settings you can adjust the length of your DTFM tones. Who cares?
There are lots of little things to get used to. On the iPhone you click the physical button at the bottom of the screen to wake the phone. On the Droid you click the power button on the top of the phone. This is annoying because there are buttons at the bottom of the Droid screen. I feel like I should be able to hit “Home” to wake the phone (and I always do this before remembering to hit power).
The address book app, the Market, and other built-in functionality doesn’t feel quite right after using an iPhone. They’re totally functional, but they’re a little dark (the background in these apps is black) and function somewhat differently. I’m guessing that after a couple weeks of usage I’ll get used to them and won’t notice this anymore.
There are, of course, fewer apps available for the Android. This bothers me less than it may bother others because I don’t really use many apps in the first place. The ones I do use (Foursquare, OpenTable, etc.) all seem to already be available for the Droid.

My verdict after a day? This is a fantastic phone. Really solid. The build quality’s great, the service is great, and the software is great. There are definitely kinks to work out. Most of them can be resolved with software updates.

I’m keeping my iPhone active and on AT&T for a week or two while I use my Droid as my primary phone. I’m going to forward my number rather than porting it. At the moment I’m assuming that I’ll just cancel my iPhone service in a couple weeks. But I’m keeping it around as a hedge for a little while at least. This is made practical by the fact that I didn’t have to sign a contract to activate the phone with Verizon. I’m paying $65 per month (plus, I just remembered, a $20 “smart phone fee”) and am totally month-to-month. I can cancel at any time. So I have the luxury of time to make a decision, during which time I can use both devices.

I think it says something, though, that my iPhone is in my jacket pocket and has been all morning. I’m not even thinking about it. I’m just going to use it for a moment to forward the number, and I have a feeling I won’t be touching it for two weeks. We’ll see.