So I had a chance to update my Blackberry Tour to the all new Motorola Droid and I have never looked back. After using a trusty BB Pearl, I thought the Tour would even be a better experience. It was at first, then came the audio problems and then the frequent lock ups and well it just wasn’t reliable enough for business use. The Droid on the other hand has not had to be rebooted even once the 2 months I’ve been using it. I love the touch screen and the growing app library. True the iPhone has a vastly superior app library for now. The UI is fast and I have installed around 20 apps without any hiccups. (I do tend to only download the highly rated apps though). The form factor is only slightly larger than the iPhone but still feels pretty big. I like how solid it feels and there is a good weight to the device. The slide out keyboard is sturdy but the keys are flat and no where near the enjoyable of an experience as the BB keys. The Dpad is pretty useless and more of an inconvience for me at least as it takes up a big portion of the right side of the keyboard. The screen is absolutely beautiful. The colors are bright and vivid and there is a lot of real estate to watch videos or type long messages like this blog entry. The sound quality is hit and miss. Most times I can hear everyone with crystal clarity but the people on the receiving end complain of me sounding far away if the phone is held at certain angles or they hear their own echos making understanding near impossible. The echo issue is even worse on speaker phone making the speakerphone pretty useless. I’ve talked to the Verizon people about this and they said it seems to be a problem that others have complained about and it may be fixed in the next update. The did recommend turning down the volume for now but that only goes so far before you can’t hear anymore. Another big issue is the wifi. Often I’ll be connected via wifi and will not be able to download from the Marketplace because it will just get stuck at “starting download”. I’m not sure what that is about but it happens frequently. Overall I’m very happy with the phone and hope that these issues get fixed soon.
