Hands on with the Motorola Droid: Sexy

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Here you are, friends and Romans, the Motorola Droid from Verizon, the phone you’ve been salivating over for the past few months. It’s now sitting quietly on the desk next to me, wondering where you are. The Droid wants you.

After working with the Motorola Cliq and MotoBlur, Motorola’s own operating system, I had high to middling hopes for this phone. Looking at it now I’m happy to report that Verizon finally has an Android phone worth a second look.



I need a little more time with the phone to offer my full level of adulation/excoriation, but so far I’ve noticed a few things:

  • Google Nagivation is an incredible addition to the Android family and looks great. The standalone Nav app guys need to worry.
  • The hardware is quite nice. The keyboard is spacious and easy to slide open.
  • There are none of the widgets that MotoBlur featured prominently including the Twitter widget that threatened to crash the phone.
  • The phone is very polished but the base of installed applications seems very sparse. After working with the Hero and the Cliq, you sort of expect all sorts of silly clocks and social networking apps. This has none of that.
  • It has the best start-up sound in the whole world.