Verizon Wireless is the US's largest wireless carrier, and it's renowned for its good network coverage. At the same time, Verizon's top-end consumer smartphones have been represented by its aging collection of Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices. The Apple iPhone went to AT&T, the Palm Pre to Sprint, and the first generation of Android devices to T-Mobile. But Verizon has finally struck back, taking the first Android 2.0 Device and releasing it with some Apple-like hype. Ars has gotten a hold of a Droid, and we've taken it (and the Android 2.0 platform) out for a test drive.
With the release of the Motorola Droid, Verizon Wireless takes a shot directly at the iPhone. Featuring an eye-catching 3.7" WVGA screen, the same speedy ARM Cortex A8-based processor that powers the Pre and the iPhone 3GS, and a modern smartphone OS, the Droid is definitely a phone to be reckoned with. But is all this enough to make this phone your daily companion?
Unboxing & new user experience:
The Droid's "new hardware" experience is a bit different from other smartphones. As a Verizon phone, most people buy it at the store, so they receive the phone "unboxed" already. At the Verizon store where I got mine, the representative was very helpful with the process of activating my phone over the CDMA network and linking it to my Google account. While not mandatory, you lose out on many of the phone's features if you do not want to have Google manage your online existence. The Android Market is also not available unless you have a Google account.
The Droid's packaging is minimal and neat. You get the phone, a microUSB-to-USB cable, a two-pronged AC/DC-to-USB inverter, and a small amount of documentation. However, this neat little box is marred on the side with an uninformative notice containing the box's contents, disclaimers, and a large sticker with a dozen serial numbers. Basically the art and packaging departments did a wonderful job, then Verizon/Motorola went back and ruined it.
Unboxed Droid
The Hardware
The overall physical hardware design is a bit different than other popular smartphones. It's not the slick pebble of the Pre, nor the rounded slate of the iPhone, nor even the rounded edges of the HTC G1/Dream; it's actually a rather jarring collection of angles, edges, buttons, and connectors. Here it is, sitting besides a HTC G1 and a Palm Pre.
G1, Droid, and Pre
The screen is well-built and slides out with a solid "click," without any spring assistance. But the screen doesn't overlap the bottom half of the phone, making for an uneven look. The micro USB connector is a lump in the side of the phone, so unless you have the actual Motorola car dock, you won't be able to charge it while using a generic car mount. When grasping the phone, you feel the edges and side buttons, making it uncomfortable to hold for long periods. In addition, the placement of the camera and volume buttons make them very easy to accidentally bump. Overall, it's just not a very well-planned layout.
Some users might also be wary of the lack of a physical "call" and "end call" button, as those are handled by the phone application. The front face buttons are just hotspots on the capacitive screen. And the phone lacks protection against liquids, since the microUSB jack and all the speakers sit exposed.
The overall hardware specs are:
* CPU: TI OMAP 3430 (Arm Cortex A8 @ 550 mhz, PowerVR SGX 530)
* RAM: 256MB
* Flash Memory: 512MB built in (for program storage)
* Secondary: 16GB removable MicroSD (for music/images/general storage)
Keyboard
Droid keyboard
The Droid keyboard is not what I would consider great. It has very little differentiation between the keys, and this makes it fairly easy to mistype. The keyboard also is only 4 rows, so your Alt keys get used a lot more, and there are fewer characters available. I found myself not using the physical keyboard much at all. I also found myself turning off auto-rotate features quite a bit.
Screen
Screen Size Comparison
All this, however, is made up for by that screen. That glorious, bright, huge screen. Good enough to read in daylight, and auto-dimming so that it works well at night without being blinding, this screen is what other devices aspire to have when they grow up. See above for a comparison of the pixel count between the G1 and the Droid. Not only is the screen physically taller for finger-swiping goodness, but it has significantly more pixels to push. This shows if you're watching something on YouTube HD, or previewing digital pictures from the 5MP camera. The difference is that big, and there's no other phone that comes close at this point.
Camera
Speaking of Droid's 5MP camera, it's actually not all that bad. Here are some shots comparing it and the G1/Dream camera, in the same situations. Overall, it's a tiny camera in a pocketphone--you can't ask too much of it. Both phones perform similarly outdoors, barring differences in megapixel counts. Here's some more stressful situations.
Up close Macros:
Droid Macro
G1 Macro
Macro performance is OK. Not super, not horrible. Pretty much the same as the G1. Just slightly different exposure conditions there.
Low Light Pics
Droid Lowlight No Flash
Droid Low Light w/ Flash
G1 Low Light No Flash
Low-light performance is passable, but not brilliant by any means. The built-in dual LED flash, however, is good enough to turn a marginal situation into one where you will end up with a Facebook-quality picture. Still, if you want real pictures, this phone's camera isn't what you are looking for.
The Droid also comes with a light and proximity sensor. This means that the screen will dim/brighten to match ambient conditions. This also allows the phone to lock the screen when it is held up to your head when you talk using the handset. As the touchscreen is used for almost all functions of the phone, the sensor comes in handy. The fading effect can be distracting in moderate lighting, but works very well in bright lighting. Also of note is how the car and home dock modes are triggered by the built in magnetometer.
Interfacing with Android 2.0
Android 2.0, aka "Eclair," is an evolutionary step up from previous releases of Android. While some may call the interface jumbled, once you understand the paradigm it makes decent sense. Commonly used applications and widgets are stored on the user-configurable "Home" screens. The Droid comes with 3, which you switch between by swiping left and right.
Home Screen
Additional applications are accessed by dragging up or clicking the program tray at the bottom of the home screen.
Apps Screen
Android 1.6 introduced a universal search bar, which will search contacts, applications, and the Web. The voice search also links directly here.
Search Bar
You can also utilize the voice search to launch applications like the navigation module of Google maps, which is new for Android 2.0. The Navigation module, by the way, will be the death knell of services like Telenav and all other for-pay "online" GPSes. It's integrated into the OS, it caches directions for when there is no signal, and it is linked to Google search so it is very up to date. All for no additional cost.
Google Navigation
A quick note on task switching: Android displays only one application at a time. When you are running multiple tasks, they appear on your notifications tray. To switch, just drag down the tray and then tap the application. With lots of apps, this can get unwieldy, but it works well enough for typical use cases. During this test, I used Maps navigation, Google Listen for audio podcasts, an IRC client in the background, and pulled up a Twitter account, all without any speed issues whatsoever.
Notifcation Tray
Droid also comes with a "Car Home" mode which is a simplified interface for use while driving. Once the Droid is mounted into the Motorola Car Dock, it automatically shifts to this mode for safety. You can opt to go back to the regular home screen if you want.
Car Home
New Features
Android 2.0 comes with a bevy of refinements to its connectivity features. These include VPN support, multiple account support, exchange support, HTML5 support, bluetooth 2.1, and quite a few more which can best be found in the Android Platform Highlights document.
Problems
During my time with the Droid, the Android 2.0 software seemed fairly well polished. Very occasionally, there was a slight stutter if the phone was simultaneously performing an email sync and twitter sync at the same time, but this only happened once to me during the review period. The camera worked fine for me, but according to some reports there is an intermittent issue with the camera autofocus software which will be fixed in an upcoming over-the-air patch.
Apps
Android's application library has been growing over the past year. While nowhere near as big as the Apple App Store's 70,000 titles, it does sport over 10,000 applications, including free, ad-supported, and for-pay options that do all manner of things. Yes, there's an app for that on Android too. At this point, the number of applications has hit a point of diminishing returns as the number of choices for each category keeps growing.
Android manages applications via the Android Market, which exists as an application on the device so that you don't need a computer to manage your applications. Android can back up applications (with the aid of 3rd Party apps such as 'My Backup') onto removable Micro SD media for archival purposes. If your SD happens to be corrupted, applications can be redownloaded for free from the Market. Android's ability to allow programs deeper access into its file system means that there are a ton of handy utilities for various purposes.
Android has applications for just about every sort of task that could be done on a mobile device. A short listing of applications that I use on the Droid is below:
Media:
* BeyondPod - Podcatcher and Podcast player
* Last.fm - Music Streaming
* Pandora - Music Streaming
* Tunewiki - Music playback with lyrics
Communications:
* Google Voice - One phone number, all your phones, visual voicemail and transcriptions.
* Twidget Lite - Twitter home screen widget
* IRC Radio - "Speaking" IRC client.
* ConnectBot - SSH
* Android IRC - IRC client with good support for multiple windows
Maps and Navigation:
* Google Places - A directory showing multiple points of interest with distance, direction, and a quick description, all integrated with Google Maps
* Google Sky Maps - A sky map using the accelerometer and magnetic compass to orient the phone with the sky.
* TransiCast - A program which overlays live bus locations on top of Google maps
* Wikitude - Wikipedia as an "Enhanced Reality" overlay, so you can point your phone and get information from Wikipedia about the real world.
* Google "My Tracks" - A GPS logger which integrates into Google Maps.
Other Apps:
* Tricorder - A Star Trek style Tricorder which shows the actual values being recorded by the phone's sensors.
* FBReader - E-book reader
* Key Ring - Uses the camera to scan barcodes, then plays back the barcodes on-screen, for rewards cards and the like.
* Astrid - A task manager compatible with "Remember the Milk."
* Gmote - A remote for your computer, makes the phone into a touchpad.
To be fair, there aren't many 3D games being developed on the Android platform at the moment, but the hardware is perfectly capable of it.
Migration
Coming to an Android device from another smartphone is pretty simple. Google Sync allows iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry users to sync their contact lists to Google Docs, and then the Android OS automatically syncs with those contacts. If you're migrating from a previous Android device, profile data is automatically loaded once you sign into Google, and Android applications purchased are linked to your Google account, not your device, so no repurchase is required. Music and video storage is available on the included MicroSD card, so you can just copy over the files or use your favorite music manager which can handle storage on FAT media. All you need to do is click on the "mount SD card" icon on the notification screen when you connect the Droid to your computer.
Battery life
The Droid will last a full day under moderate usage. If you're going to navigate or play music, plan on 3-4 hours of "screen on" time without swapping batteries, or investing in a charger for the office and the car. It's not the best battery life, but it does well enough amongst smartphones. Swapping a battery is fairly easy because of its very accessible battery location.
That swappable battery
After a day of use, the Android power monitor says that over 50% of the battery usage is from the screen, so turning it down would help significantly.
The Network
I benchmarked the networks using Xtremelabs Speedtest. These numbers are valid only in my location, but they show that Verizon's network speed is pretty much on par with the other providers. However, that's not the strong point of the network. Anecdotally, Verizon has better coverage, and the signal strength is much better indoors, staying at 3G speeds while iPhones and G1s shift to EDGE performance. This varies with geography, though, so I would suggest checking your local network conditions if this is important to you.
Final thoughts
Overall, I like the Droid. The hardware design is merely par for the course; it's well-made but has some rough edges. The hardware specs, however, combined with Android 2.0, makes this a good enough device to be a solid competitor to the iPhone 3GS. This is the hardware that Android should have shipped with. In some areas it is better, in some areas on par, and some areas slightly worse than the iPhone or other high end smartphones. But all of it is "just good enough." It all depends on your preferences in phone features. If multitasking matters, the Pre and the Droid are your only choices. Droid lets you play music on Pandora, navigate, and check Twitter all at the same time, with no lag and no delays. If you're looking for a media player phone or a camera phone, on the other hand, you might check elsewhere. It just comes down to the feature set you're looking for.
The Droid is close enough to its competitors, however, that non-phone factors start coming into play. The network reception is vastly better on this phone, getting signal where iPhones and G1's don't. Once the Droid and Droid-like hardware starts going to Sprint and T-Mobile, you'll also have a choice to compete on plan price as well.
If you're on Verizon and you like their service, there is no reason to switch to AT&T anymore unless you just absolutely have to have an iPhone. If you're on Sprint or T-Mobile and you like your plan's price, be assured that Droid or its friends will be coming to you as well. This is a good thing, even if you aren't going to get a Droid. Competition will drive innovation, and we'll all be better off for it.
Ars Technica