Three days with the Motorola Droid

Computerworld exercises the hot new Android smartphone

By John Cox on Fri, 11/13/09 - 10:11am.

Computerworld freelancer David Haskin puts aside his antique Motorola Q phone, takes up the new Motorola Droid, and on a three-day roadtrip falls in love, geekwise.

"On the whole, it is as carefully designed, useful and fun to use as an iPhone. At last."

Setup for Google-based email and PIM data was "brain-dead simple." But " sideloading music to it from my Mac was an annoying process."

Google's free beta GPS navigation app was on a par with others. "Throughout the trip, navigation was comparable to other GPS systems I've used. That is, it usually worked well, but had a few quirks."

"Battery life was satisfactory. For testing purposes, after we left home, I didn't plug the Droid into our car's AC outlet. With the GPS and cellular radios on, making a number of calls and receiving e-mail, the battery lasted only a bit more than three hours. With the GPS off and using the device simply for the occasional phone call and for push e-mail, the battery lasted a bit more than six hours...."

Multi-tasking: "To switch among running tasks, you press and hold the home button and a dialog appears with icons for the six most recently opened and still-running applications. You just tap on one of those application icons to switch to it."

On Droid's keyboard, which has gotten mixed reviews: "The keyboard is quite usable. My wife said that the Droid's keys were larger and easier for her to use than the keyboard on her beloved BlackBerry. I found the keys too small for typing with my large thumbs, although using my index fingers worked fine. Overall, though, I prefer the virtual keyboard, which works almost identically to the one I use regularly on my iPod Touch."