Like it or not, Motorola’s new Google-powered Droid smart phone will be compared to the iPhone.
The good news is that this feature-rich handset, running version 2.0 of Google’s Android OS, compares very favorably to the Goliath of the smart phone world as a utility mobile-computing device — and, oh yeah, a phone.
The bad news is that there may be too many good things going on to make using this device the quick, intuitive, out-of-the-box experience it should be. That’s a problem, given that the iPhone has set the usability bar so high.
Like the iPhone and many other handsets this is a primarily a touchscreen device whose face is almost 100 percent screen — and a bright, crisp screen it is. Rather than take sides in the virtual-vs.-hardware keyboard debate, the Droid provides both. The hardware keyboard slides out in a familiar landscape mechanism, and it includes a 5-way directional pad, the better to allow you to keep your hands on the keyboard once you have them there.
On-board music purchase is from Amazon (at least), but when the Droid is connected to a computer, it’s read as an SD card, and dragging any tracks onto it makes them playable within the music app. The Droid also sports a 5-MP camera with autofocus, on-demand flash and video.
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