As I mentioned here earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about switching to a different network. Love the iPhone, but am completely unimpressed with AT&T’s network. So I went into a Verizon store to look at the Droid over the weekend, and then bought one after work at BestBuy on Monday.
I did the transaction at BestBuy because you get the rebate immediately, instead of having to cut off the label from the box and send it in to Verizon if you were to buy the phone at the Verizon store.
The phone itself is quite nice. If I hadn’t been spoiled on the iPhone, it would be the best phone I’ve played with or had. I’ve had a couple of Blackberries, used by wife’s Motorola Q. I haven’t used a recent Palm, so can’t compare it to that.
Verizon has a superior network. The call quality is night and day. The calls are crisp, the 3G network is fast, and phone calls have not been dropped in the past three two plus days. That’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which would’ve dropped at least 2 or 3 of those calls.
As for the phone: On the upside, the physical keyboard (in addition to a virtual keyboard), while not very good, is nice to have. The keyboard is too flat, so it makes finding the right keys hard. There are many free apps, and they’re pretty good quality. If you use Google and Gmail for your email, contacts, and calendar, the integration is seamless. Even Facebook contacts are properly synched. Google Voice works great, and because I’m now on a fast network, the call quality between Google Voice and the regular phone isn’t different.
I got the 16 gig version, but thankfully I can swap out the 16 gig SD card in the future for a 32 gig card if I ever want to expand the memory on the phone. If I bought an iPhone, I’d have to buy a whole new phone to increase the capacity. 32 gig SD cards now run at about $90 to $100, so they’re not cheap, but the Read more