My official review of the Droid after a few weeks of use:
1. The battery cover comes off at least 5 times per day when I take it out of my pocket. This problem is all over the Internet. Some people are able to get a new cover, but sometimes that doesn't fix it. It's really annoying because sometimes you don't even know the cover is off and then you have to go looking for it. My Razr's cover never came off in the years and years of use. I don't get why they would go with such a poor design.
2. The phone comes unlocked in my pocket constantly. I'm always accidentally calling people and browsing the app store, GPSing, etc. without knowing it. I did figure out how to make it harder to unlock the phone with a more complicated movement scheme, but even then, the emergency dialer funtion is always going and I'm accidentally dialing people still.
3. Sometimes the phone simply locks up. It's locked up 6 times so far. You have to take the battery out to restart it.
4. Sometimes the dial pad doesn't show up when you are hanging up a call. I wave the phone around to make the buttons appear on the touchscreen but they never show up. The other person has to hang up on me during these times. If I called someone and the voicemail came up, and I don't want to leave a message, I end up leaving a 15 second voicemail of nothing because the screen won't appear.
5. I've lost approximately 25 calls since I got the phone. My Razr lost 3 calls in 4 years. My Droid has lost 25 in 3 weeks. Same service provider (Verizon), same place (my house), yet I lose calls like I'm in the desert.
6. The hardware keypad is hard to use. I always hit the wrong keys when using it. Thankfully the software keyboard is absolutely great.
7. The phone slides apart in my pocket constantly. It's annoying to have to slide it back together before I can take it out of my pocket.
8. When talking on the phone with anyone, my cheek is always pressing the touch screen and doing random shit like activating GPS or dialing numbers, etc. Why does the touch screen even work during a call? It should wait until you move it down from your face and then activate the screen. It has this capability.
9. There needs to be zero buttons on the side of the phone. They all do various functions, and when calling someone, it's way too easy to hit these side buttons, especially if you're trying to multitask. They need to do nothing when on a call.
10. Web surfing is phenomenal. Web pages look amazing, load quickly, and scroll down perfectly. Easily the best part of this phone.
11. Apps work great. The voice GPS is amazing. The other day I was going out to a fire station to fix a PC and I opened my phone and said "Navigate to one one zero five Old Salem Road, Kernersville, NC" and it said "turn right onto 8th street" and after 10 minutes of following the turn by turn voice commands, I was there. This is serious Star Trek shit.
12. The UI is a bit unintuitive. An OS from Google should be easier to use IMO. Deleting files and shortcuts is a huge pain. Anything that requires more than clicking something requires you to bring up the options menu, and the important stuff is generally buried in multiple menus.
13. The camera is amazing. The picture quality of snapshots and movies is very, very good.
14. The battery life is pretty shitty. If you use it as a telephone only, it'll go about 2 days. If you use any sort of app on it, 24 hours and you're doing good. Not a huge deal since it's a smart phone, but I miss charging my phone once a week.
Yet I am still keeping the phone. The good outweighs the bad, and Google will constantly be updating the OS. Really the biggest issues for me right now are the dropped calls and the battery cover constantly coming off.
__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert
Last edited by Lasereth; 11-23-2009 at 12:07 PM..
|