Review of the Motorola Droid

So I've had my Motorola Droid for a bit over two weeks now, and I thought I'd post my thoughts on it. Reviewing it immediately is a bad idea, as first of all, I was pretty giddy, second of all, I had never had a smartphone, and third of all, I hadn't gotten used to it to make a full judgement. I'll break it down simple.

The Pros:
Screen- The screen is gorgeous, and very responsive to touch. It's kind of neat that the screen turns off when you have your phone at your ear during a call, but sometimes it doesn't turn back on immediately when you go to end the call, takes a second or so. Graphics are very powerful...SNES emulator looks great on it. Contra 3, however, is still impossible.
Camera- The video is ridiculous. 720p on this thing.
Keyboard- Some people like to slam the physical keyboard, and it could be designed better, by offsetting the keys or creating small dimples, but after two weeks, I'm pretty used to it. The touch screen keyboard is great, but I like the real keyboard feel better. Haptic feedback on the main four buttons is great, and they are thought out very well- Return, Menu, Home, and Search.
Openness- Full integration and support with Google Voice. Tethering via USB/Bluetooth available through the Android Market for free. You can install apps by downloading them from the phone, or copying them to the SD card, you aren't limited to only the Android market. Tons of Apps on the Android market, not as much as for the iPhone, yet, but I haven't found anything I'm missing yet.
Battery Life- I'll be honest, I figured a phone like this with GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, and ability to run multiple apps at a time would be a powerhog, and that it'd be difficult to get through the day without charging, though it's battery easily lasts a full day with fairly often use. I usually use it to listen to music walking around campus, (I lost my iPod at the Rochester airport, something poetic about that) browse websites occasionally, etc, and I don't have an issue with low battery. And that's with push Gmail and such running.
Verizon's 3G Network- It's fast. Impressively so. I've heard from plenty of my friends with iPhones that AT&T is iffy when you're outside of New Orleans, and even in the city their network gets overloaded sometimes, often at night, and slows to a crawl. No issue here. Back in Rochester, I got about 1mbps down in my house. I even got 3G coverage in my basement, which has poor cell reception. At the Atlanta airport, it was about 2.5mbps down. In my house here in New Orleans, I get about 1.5mbps down. For comparison, my cable internet is running at about 400kbps, which is dreadful. But what can you do, they have a monopoly? Anyways, Verizon's network is as good as they say.
Swappable Battery/SD- So the phone has 256mb memory built in, and that's where you can install apps. At first, critics questioned over whether that'd be enough. Most apps are only about 700k, the biggest one I have is 1.3mb, so you'd have to be a nutjob to fill it. It uses a MicroSD card, came with a 16gb one by default, which I say, hooray for standards. Speaking of standards, it uses MicroUSB to charge and move data to your MicroSD card. Critics also said that MicroUSB has a charge limit via computer, which is true, it charges pretty slowly, but it came with a USB-to-outlet adapter. The battery, which is swappable (and pretty inexpensive, $30 or so) charges via the wall in a bit over an hour, pretty fast.

Nice Things I Never Use
Car Mode/GPS navigation- The car mode is pretty neat, and I can see it being very useful. GPS navigation is excellent, as good as TomTom but with the benefit of Google layers, like the traffic one. I don't have a car, so I use neither, though I did get voice navigation to my friends house about 45minutes outside of Nola when another friend was driving me there.
Voice Search- It works quite well, I just don't really use it. It is odd though, that Google Voice Search and "Voice Dialer" are separate. Google Voice search goes through the internet, your contacts, your music, etc, which is nice. But as far as calling your contacts, or dialing a number by voice, you'll want to use Voice dialer. I don't really use either, though. There's been talk about Google Visual Search, where you take a picture of something and it tries to search for it. Like the voice search it's very neat, but I don't foresee myself using it much.


The Cons
There's only two I can think of.

Camera- The camera itself is amazing. 5 megapixels, as I said, it can take 720p video. But the software is crap...it takes 4-5 seconds to snap a picture, save, and then snap another one. It's just too slow, but this can be fixed by a firmware upgrade. It's received a fair amount of attention, so hopefully Google/Motorola are working on it.
Music/Movie player- The music player is adequate, though it could be better. Video player, it'd be nice to have installed by default. I use the music player a lot, since I lost my iPod, and it does the job, but there's no equalizer, and the music is organized mediocrely. Not bad, though.

All in all, I absolutely love this phone, and talking to friends, I think it's probably the best phone out there right now. It's got several features (some critical, like openness) that easily beat the iPhone, and as far as other Android phones, it's just the whole package squared together. Most of them, like the G1, G2, Droid Eris, etc, are good...but not great. I use Google Apps all the time- Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Voice, Google Reader, Google Maps, oh, and, y'know, that search engine, so for someone who is a Googler like me, it is exceptionally brilliant. It integrates great with Facebook and Gmail, merging your contacts info, which is awesome, yet occasionally creepy. For example, when I text someone, it shows their most recent Facebook status, which is neat, though odd. The price is very reasonable, $200 with a mail-in rebate, I ended up paying only $100 because my contract was up for renewal. The data plan is $30 a month, my cable internet is $52 a month, and it's slower, so it puts it into perspective for me.