A Useful Roundup on the Verizon + Motorola + Google "Droid"

Jean-Louis Gassee:

With this in mind, unlike most opining individuals above, I went to a Verizon store and paid my own money to get a Droid. I did this on the very Droid-day, Friday November 6th, at the University Avenue Verizon store in Palo Alto, around 11:30 am. No line, I waited two minutes for a salesperson, a simple transaction as I already have a Verizon account. The activation turned out to be just a bit more problematic: 'Too much traffic' said the sales gent. I left the phone with him, went back to my office one block away. When I returned by lunchtime, everything was in order. Easy enough.

I've used the Droid for a week now and my own take doesn't deviate much from what early reviews led me to expect.

As happens time and again, I hit the difference between a feature set, a check-list, and the user experience. For example, the keyboard and the camera.

The Droid's camera sports more pixels, 5 million, vs. the iPhone's 3.2 million. But, as reviewers pointed out, and as I can confirm, the Droid's pictures are mediocre. As discussed here, megapixel numbers are often misleading. And it looks like the iPhone's firmware also provides better selective focus and image processing.

As for the slide-out keyboard, I find it hard to use. Actually, it feels harder to use that the one on the original T-Mobile Gphone, the G1 I bought a year ago. The two phones are clearly related, similar keyboard arrangement, similar UI (User Interface); the Droid is more refined, thinner, it runs a newer, better Android release.