After using the Droid (ok, mine is actually a Milestone, but that is such a lame name, and too close to Millstone, which given the heft of the phone….) for a few days I am no longer so sure that this phone is going to kick butt. I know it has been selling very well in the States, but I wonder how much of those sales were due to the huge marketing spend by Motorola and how much due to the phone’s own intrinsic appeal.
Ok, let me start with the things I like about the phone. It has a large 3.7 inch capacitive screen that is large enough to render complete web pages. It is also very sensitive to the touch and a pleasure to work with gesture-wise. Mine has multi-touch support, while the real Droid doesn’t (or didn’t when originally released late last year). The phone is very fast, faster than I expected given that the Arm Cortex A8 CPU (a 600MHz, OMAP3430 chip downclocked to 550MHz) also powers the Palm Pre. The Droid is definitely fast than the Pre. The keyboard is excellent in terms of the size of the keys, travel and tactile feedback. The keyboard feels like a high quality affair, like the rest of the phone.
Typing on the Droid is somewhat spoiled by the lip sticking out the right side of the phone (when holding it in landscape mode with keyboard slid open) as well as the space used by the dpad. The result is that the phone juts into my right hand and requires my thumb to have to stretch. Quite uncomfortable. Also not enough space between the top row of keys and the bottom of the screen which makes it hard to type numbers (these are on the top row).
The vanilla Android interface on the Droid is not very slick, especially when compared with HTC’s Sense as implemented on the Hero, or with the Palm Pre’s WebOS interface. It could do with a bit more pizazz. Font size control is also completely absent, and with the small fonts used on the Droid, I have to put on my reading glasses every time I use the phone. Giving my age away here I guess, but Android badly needs the ability to change font sizes. So does, WebOS for that matter, but I at least managed to patch WebOS to get bigger fonts. Windows Mobile has had the ability for years. So has Symbian. Blackberry leads the pack here, providing a large variety of font sizes and types.
Then there is the Droid’s battery, all 1400mAh of it. It is just not good enough. I haven’t been able to get through a day (12 hours) on a single charge. Even using JuiceDefender to limit the data connection to 2 minutes out of every 15 minutes has not helped enough. It did improve the battery life, but not enough for a full day’s operation, and it meant that the phone would not connect at all outside of the 2 minutes window, which is very irritating when you are trying to surf the web for example. I see the Seidio has a 2800mAh battery for the Droid, but it makes the phone heavier and uglier, neither of which the phone needs. 
Google integration is good as can be expected from an Android phone. The Youtube client delivers excellent quality videos, coupled with the screen, maybe the best quality Youtube videos I have seen on a mobile phone to date. Android market is also good, and downloading and installing apps is a painless (and free, since I can only access free apps) exercise.
My overall impression after the first few days? I am back to using my Palm Pre.
Yesterday Palm announced their financial results for Q3 FY2010 and it was ugly. Worse news is that Q4 is going to be even uglier. Palm made a loss of $102.8m. In terms of cash flow, Palm burned through an additional $22m cash this past quarter, still spending more than they are managing to bring in. Nearly a million phones were shipped, while only 408,000 were actually sold. Ouch. This was also fewer than the 573,000 phones sold during Q2. 
