First Looks: The Verizon Motorola Droid

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Well, since we have a big road trip coming up this weekend, I decided to drop the money for the car mount for the droid; I will use it on our trip from Illinois to New York, and write up a review of how the navigation features work in a real-life situation.

I also just received review software from Drive Safe.ly; which makes a product for the Android OS that enables email and text messages to be read to you while driving. I'll put that through the paces as well, and review it next week. :)
 
rockymtnhigh said:
Well, since we have a big road trip coming up this weekend, I decided to drop the money for the car mount for the droid; I will use it on our trip from Illinois to New York, and write up a review of how the navigation features work in a real-life situation.

I also just received review software from Drive Safe.ly; which makes a product for the Android OS that enables email and text messages to be read to you while driving. I'll put that through the paces as well, and review it next week. :)
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I have the car mount, I got it two days ago and I cant say enough good things about it so far, I have been on two trips, and its been great having it there, I think you will really enjoy it!
 
I played with the VZ Droid this weekend at a store. Pretty cool phone. Comparing it to the WinMo phone, I have now, there's nothing really that jumped out at me and said "Get this now!". Slingplayer would really be missed! ;)

I'm not sure if it was the phone I was messing with but the keyboard was awful! Small and cramped. They could have made it much larger with no issues. The biggest turn off was how hard the buttons were to push. It felt like I was mashing on a calculator from the 1980s. I couldn't deal with that, and I require a full physical keyboard on my phone.

Is it really that hard to mash the buttons? The idiot at the store was just like "Yeah..the keyboard sucks, just use the onscreen one." I asked him "What's the point then? They could have made it thinner." "Well...they wanted another feature the iphone didn't have, but people are going to just use the onscreen one anyways since that what iPhone people do." Where do they find these people?
 
digiblur- What did you think of the navigation wheel? It felt really awkward to me. They could have dispensed with it and spread the KB out a bit, like the TP2 KB. As for the spacing of the QWERTY, it put me in mind of the TP you have and I know you don't like yours so the Droid wouldn't improve it for you. When you get a chance try a TP2 KB out at the AT&T store. I didn't get a chance to play with it but what I saw looked to be the best looking KB yet, even better than the TP2 I have from Verizon.
 
Don Landis said:
digiblur- What did you think of the navigation wheel? It felt really awkward to me. They could have dispensed with it and spread the KB out a bit, like the TP2 KB. As for the spacing of the QWERTY, it put me in mind of the TP you have and I know you don't like yours so the Droid wouldn't improve it for you. When you get a chance try a TP2 KB out at the AT&T store. I didn't get a chance to play with it but what I saw looked to be the best looking KB yet, even better than the TP2 I have from Verizon.
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You talking about that little pad on the keyboard? Didn't notice, I was so turned off on the keyboard since it was hard to press any buttons I closed it. I didn't get to play with any of the data on the phone since it was saying no service.

I'd pass on the AT&T Tilt2(TP2) keyboard since I hate the fact they gimped the keyboard where you have to hit the alt key to hit the numbers. Much like AT&T did with the Fuze(TP1).

The Sprint version of the Touch Pro 1's keyboard is fine to me. No alt for the numbers.. doesn't take much to press the buttons. I would prefer the CDMA version of the TP2 over the TP1, but I'm in no hurry to plunk out some money just for a little bigger screen and bigger keyboard. I'll wait till my keyboard breaks on my Touch Pro again to swap it for the TP2. Been through 2 or 3 TP's due to the common keyboard failure...no cost to me though, so I didn't care.
 
I agree, at first glance, the keyboard seems lacking, but when you actually use it, it is pretty easy to work, and I make few errors with it.

I must say having just had the phone on a 15 hour drive from the midwest to the Northeast, this has been an amazing companion in the car. The navigation tools are superb at identifying construction and traffic issues; the voice search was out of this world. My wanted a christian radio station, I hit the voice search and said "contemporary christian radio rochester, ny" and had the results in a second. Wanted a hotel and said "Hampton Inn, Batavia, NY" and had the hotel phone.

I switch to the weather widget, and it automatically updates local weather based on location. AN impressive device, without a doubt.
 
Mike- try this with your Droid- When you have some time, set the cache on your Google Maps fairly high, like 50-75% of your storage card. Mine is set for 8Gb as I have a 16 Gb card in the TP2. Then while connected to wifi ( this is faster ) scan around your area or the whole USA for that matter ( but this will take a lot of work and time ) Build up the cache of maps downloaded to your Droid memory. Then shut off your 3G connection and wifi, ( airplane mode ) and now go to Google Maps and see that you can load the maps from your device as opposed to downloading them all the time. I have the entire country downloaded at 160 mi (high) resolution and this works great for flying. I have all of North Florida now downloaded to (High) resolution maps at 2 miles.
Besides the maps working faster when you are traveling, you have insurance if you should end up in a place that doesn't have internet ( 3G connection ) I plan to load a moderate resolution collection of the Grand Canyon and other rural areas I plan to visit that I know is so far out of the way it is unlikely the GPS would work without doing this.
 
JAG72 said:
Lets start seeing some Droid speedtest.net results so we can see how great the Verizon 3G network is.
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I am a bit surprised that nobody has posted any speed tests from the Droid yet. I would really like to see how the Verizon network compares.

(Tests that I would like to see are non teathered tests)
 
hall said:
How much does the phone itself factor into a speedtest ? It shouldn't...
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The hardware factors into the speed tests. It has to be able to process all of the packets that are being sent and received and that is figured into how fast the connection is.
 
Based on stuart's test then, the hardware in the Droid phones is inferior to my SMT5800. That said, I think you're not giving "modern" hardware enough credit...
 
There are differences between a 3G test` and between processor speed/rendering.

I would think a wifi test would be best for comparing rendering; I would think 3G speeds are going to differ depending on network traffic.

I will run that mobilespeedtest and see what I find.
 
Mine came in a 465kbps, which compared favorably on their chart with 3G, which was listed at 400kpbs.

To be honest, I don't think the initial rendering of pages is necessarily stellar, but once they are up, it is very functional. Zooming in and out is quick, the screen is responsive. No complaints from me.



I just turned the phone off, and switched to wifi, and for the basic test got 730kbps; then I did the 2MB test and got 2043kbps.

With wifi the page load was definitely zippier, but the 3G is not bad at all; and I am able to run satelliteguys in the full mode, and not have to use pda mode.
 
I just did the 100K and came up with 683, then I did the 500K and got 417; and did the 1MB and got 579. but I think this is all so dependent on bandwidth. I live in an area where there are 15,000 white collar workers (at State Farm), and Verizon is the major carrier here; I find that where I am and when I use it matters a lot.

It would nice if I could do a side-by-side test with an iphone at the same time, and comparing the two 3G networks in the same community.
 
you cant really, i mean it does depend on area/network traffic and all that...this is what I care about, does it load pages at an acceptable time to me, are there hangups (freezing due to network clogs) or does the software freeze, and so far, teh droid has been preforming at the highest level for me in real world situations.
 

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