In what seems like the never ending race to pull the iPhone from its throne, Motorola and Verizon have joined forces to release the Droid. After much hype with a commercial going straight for Apple’s jugular
With the Droid finally arriving, gadget enthusiasts have been lining up for hours waiting to get their hands on the new device. If you were curious about whether or not you should pick one up or upgrade, here’s a few things you should know about it.
How Does It Look?
Unlike the iPhone, Blackberry, Sidekick or the T-Mobile G1, the Droid doesn’t have curved corners and looks pretty basic at first. But what it lacks in flashiness, it makes up in size. Amazingly, it’s thinner than an iPhone. It also trumps Apple’s golden child with a QUERTY keyboard. If you don’t already know, that means you’re not limited to typing on the screen. Slide the screen up and tweet, IM and email until your thumbs cramp.
Speaking of typing, the keyboard doesn’t seem to be fat finger friendly at all. The keys aren’t offset so if you don’t have baby hands like myself, typing could be a bit of a challenge.
Does It Work?
So far the new Android operating system has been really close to being solid. Most of the complaints about Android has been tons of crashes, slow response time and a lack of good programs to run on it. For the exception of that last, the new version (Android 2.0) is said to have worked out a lot of those problems. If that’s true then we just might have a winner on our hands.
One of the other things to look out for is the extra charges that Verizon is going to beat you in the head with. For instance, if your job has their email on an exchange server (synchronized contacts, calendar and email without you having to manually check it), then you have to ante up an extra $30 a month for Verizon’s data plan. There were rumors that it was going to be $45 a month but that’s only for business accounts. The other rumor is that Verizon will release a tethering plan which will allow you to hook the Droid up to a comp
