Engadget reviews the Motorola Droid | Hacker News Reader

Engadget reviews the Motorola Droid

engadget.com

47 pointsunalone33 comments

It seems like a really fair review. People who want to believe their iPhones are better than everything else will find ammunition to support that claim. People who want an alternative to the iPhone will also find cause to rejoice. I like my iPhone, and I'm not really tempted to switch, but I'm glad to see some serious competition. Here's hoping for continued innovation from every quarter.

Given the amount of money to be made doing this stuff, it was inevitable that other good smart phones would arise. Props to google for realizing that its the OS that really makes a phone, not the hardware. Obviously, the Droid is a nice piece of hardware, but any other Andriod 2.0 phone will be very close to the same.

I wish Nokia would get their shit together and really make a good OS.

Nokia has had a great OS for years, but the Maemo engineers haven't been allowed to put a radio in their devices until the N900. Now they can.

Unfortunately, Nokia paid the price for dancing with the carriers for too long. I do wonder if Apple is headed down the similar road with the iPhone (i.e. dramatic success that is eventually overtaken because of the entanglements of their required partners - carriers and media companies).

There's a fine line to walk. Nokia went over it a long time ago, and now they're on the opposite side of the line.

Keeping phone and provider separate is great for the consumer, but not in the long run since the phone companies don't get the market they need.

i.e. it would be great if I could use the iPhone on any network I wanted, but without an exclusive deal with AT&T, Apple wouldn't have made the kind of cash it needs to be truly profitable and stay at the top of the market.

Nokia pandered to cell companies for too long, but then went in the exact opposite direction and lost a huge chunk of the US market with them....

Definitely: radio is the killer app that will save Nokia.

I think he meant "radio" as in the GSM module.

I agree, I'm planning on picking one up as soon as the local Verizon store opens up.

For those of also interested in the Droid, check out http://www.droidforums.net

If the Droid didn't have a physical keyboard, I would strongly consider getting one.

To me, the physical keyboard is just a burden that adds thickness and weight.

Aside from that, the Droid looks fantastic and is the first iPhone alternative to make me think about switching.

This review doesn't touch on the lack of good desktop syncing software. I think people underestimate how big of a selling point this is for the iPhone just as it was for the original iPod. iTunes might not be the most fantastic app but for power users but it solves a lot of everyday problems for people who don't know any better. This phone, and basically all of the iPhone competitors, are lacking. They seem to be pitching this phone towards a more technically literate audience based on the advertising campaign so perhaps it won't matter much. I think the true "iPhone killer" is going to need to match or exceed iTunes and have a conduit to a market place for buying content to really catch on with a mainstream audience.

I'm excited about the Droid. It looks good and it seems like it runs pretty well. It's the first non-iPhone that I've looked at and kinda thought "I would not mind one of those."

However, not to bring the mood down or anything, but do you guys remember the hype around the Pre at CES in January?

Yeah. I really hope the Droid doesn't pull a Pre. Because I really want this phone to succeed.

One key difference: The hype around the Pre was all about pre-production hardware. It was folks looking at what they had at CES and going "in a few months this is sooo going to be awesome." In typical Palm fashion, they very conservatively didn't really improve it from CES to launch.

It clearly needed some improvement (does everyone at Palm have the worlds smallest hands?)

I recently bought an HTC Hero(still waiting for it to arrive), and I didn't want to wait for the Droid because i generally don't like moving parts in a phone. I find that they tend to break or malfunction quickly.

But i still have buyer's remorse because the Droid has the faster processor. Oh well, i guess you'll never buy anything if you keep on waiting for the newer and better.

I personally don't think it's better than an iPhone, but I don't know if it needs to be. It's the first viable alternative out there. It's good for the market, which is in turn good for everyone else. I hope they don't rely on the whole "iDont" thing too much in the future, since Apple can make all those claims obsolete if they feel like it.

I was an early adopter, I pre-ordered a G1 and have had it for about a year now. I really love hardware keyboards, so +1 for the G1 and for the Moto Droid. However, the article talks about a bit of lag here and there, which is quite irritating, probably the thing I hate most about android phones. Though, I do feel like the G1 was a competitor to the iPhone off the bat because it could do everything the iphone did, just a little slower =/

The iPhone is very well done, without lag from what I can tell. I suppose that's easier to do though when you make the hardware and software in the same place.

For now, I say the iPhone is still the best phone out there, but only because of the stuttering issues that Android phones seem to have. In a year or so, phone hardware will catch up with the Android platform and will run smooth as silk.

Its the price we pay to be able to listen to mp3s whilst GPS navigating in the car!

Or leaving my SSH session open while replying to a tweet and checking a website.

My point: until a super-fast android is released, would you rather have things slow but the ability to multitask, or fast but no multitasking at all?

The iPhone can play MP3s while doing anything else, there are GPS Nav apps for the iPhone, and nobody wants to ssh from a phone anyways.

"and nobody wants to ssh from a phone anyways."

Really? I got word that my site was down, and was able to shell in and fix it from my G1. Coincidentally, I happened to be at an Android developer meeting at the time.

I'll grant that the G1 (etc.) is a more of a hacker phone than the iPhone, but some of us really do like being able to code up a useful app and drop on our phones or easily share it with others, or VNC to a desktop machine to check something, or ssh somewhere to go a fix.

Actually, being able to ssh from a phone would be about the only thing that would convince me to get one. But I suspect I'm not exactly representative of the potential customer base.

It was the exact reason I chose the G1, its generous 5 row qwerty keyboard makes daily use of SSH possible. You can type numbers and symbols in your password easily and quickly, and you get a full 80x25 display.

> and nobody wants to ssh from a phone anyways.

Actually, it's pretty handy (when your phone has an actual keyboard). I use pssh on my Palm Centro a couple times per week.

The iPhone can multitask just fine, it's just disabled by default to preserve system responsiveness and battery life. I have 6 apps open at once here.

One of the reasons why Android is slow could be its heavy reliance on Java. You can spend months tweaking and optimizing the VM, but you're still not getting close to C (and Objective-C) speeds.

I wonder what will happen if you put Symbian (which runs on most low-end smartphones from Nokia) on a high-end device like the Droid.

I think the reliance on Java has little or nothing to do with Android's overall performance.

I suspect the real difference is that Google has chosen to spend its time and energy in other places (e.g. setting up the open-source project, supporting a wide range of devices, creating flexible and complete developer APIs, etc.) rather than optimizing aggressively for performance from the start. I'd bet all of the interesting bottlenecks (e.g. browser rendering) are native code anyway and the Cyanogen ROMs clearly demonstrate that Google has left plenty of performance on the table so far. Given the pace of Android updates, I expect that to change in the not-too-distant future.

Dalvik has a pretty robust JNI implementation, and you can certainly put native code in an Android application. The NDK is getting more and more useful every release, and there's always building with the full distribution to have access to everything else. I've done it, and it's not that painful. I only worry about what might happen if Android starts showing up on other architectures. You'll have to pack in libraries for every single architecture.

I applaud Rubin's team for choosing Java as the high level library and UI implementation. While ObjC might be speedier on iPhone, it's a huge learning curve for someone that wants to write a UI-heavy app.

Does anyone know if you can get a data-only plan? I'm planning on picking one up for dev. Normally I'd just buy an unlocked one and swap a SIM card in for when I needed to use the data/cell features, but obviously I can't do that in this case.

I would like to know if the data-only plan is an option as well.

Normally I'd just buy an unlocked one and swap a SIM card in for when I needed to use the data/cell features, but obviously I can't do that in this case.

Why not? It would just be a CSIM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDMA_Subscriber_Identify_Module) card instead of a SIM card, right?

Probably not, you'd need to sign a contract. You could pay full price(600+) for one...

I thought that's what you meant when you said "unlocked".

Do want. Hopefully we get it up here in Canada :|

I won't hold my breadth.

Wondering if I should have waited since it has android 2.0 - I bought the cliq from motorola and it shipped with 1.5 (cupcake), without a published plan for updates.

Very nice device, sturdy, but too much of the social sw had to be removed :)

I'm planning to get one as soon as it comes out--I'll report back.

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