I purchased a Droid when they came out.  It’s my first Android device, and it’s been an interesting experience.  I am not a fan of the iPhone, and I’ve been using a Blackberry for the past few years (an 8700 first, then the original Curve, then the updated 8900).   The Droid is a great looking device; I like the industrial look, with my only complaint being that the big gold-coloured area on the D-pad is way too garish; it would also have been nice had that area been a trackpad-like virtual trackball.  The keyboard leaves a lot to be desired, though.  It’s a physical keyboard, which is nice, but it’s no match for a Blackberry keyboard.  Typing on it is slow and cumbersome, given the very wide layout, and some keys are very oddly placed.  (I found it amusing that while the Blackberry has a dedicated unshifted key for “$”, the Droid has a dedicated key for “?”…)

The feel of the OS is pretty nice, although some things are more sluggish than they really should be on an OMAP3 device.  Stuart keeps telling me that Fennec has smoother panning in the browser, and I think he’s right.  It’s not a deal breaker though; I find myself using the browser a lot to do all sorts of things that I never would have considered on my Blackberry (because, wow, the web browser situation there is awful), but that was a frustrating experience on my iPod Touch as well.  I’ve spent a while “browsing the web” on my phone, which I’ve never been able to say I’ve done before.

But, it’s still a phone, and while the voice portion isn’t all that important to me, the overall communication package is.  Coming from a Blackberry, the overall messaging situation on the Droid is simply horrible.  Email, whether Exchange or IMAP, is a disaster.  The email client seems designed for simple “lol r u there” type of messages, and even the message lists don’t seem intended for people who get more than 5 messages a day — turning a message list into landscape mode is worthless as you only get to see about 3-4 messages in the list (same view as in portrait mode, just along the much smaller axis of the display), no IMAP IDLE support etc. are all very strange on a top-end phone.  Exchange support works ok for Calendar sync, but for email sync it would only download the first 1000 bytes or so of a message, including headers; this meant that I often only got to see the first sentence or two of an email.  I don’t know whether this is a problem with the Droid or our Zimbra Exchange connector, but switching to IMAP for work mail fixed that problem.

An recently-released version of the open-source K9 Email Client that works on the Droid resolves many of these issues, though it needs some polish.  I might write some code there, since it’s close to becoming a pretty good email solution.

The Gtalk client is probably in worse shape than email.  It’s almost as if Google entirely ignored Gtalk on this device (and I can’t believe that would be Verizon’s fault, since things like Google Voice work just fine).  First, it’s in general buggy — it’s crashed on me multiple times, often freezes when returning to it from another app (after clicking a link to the browser, for example), and often shows contacts as offline with a big red message despite the contact clearly having a green dot next to their name and responding to my messages.

In the browser and in other apps, you can share a web page with someone using a “Share with” button.  The list you’re presented is conspicuously missing Gtalk, despite having Facebook, Email, Messaging (SMS) and a random Twitter client I installed on there.  What gives?  All of these features are available on the Blackberry; I’m not sure if it was RIM that did the Gtalk app there, but can we get whoever it was to rewrite the Android one?

One of the best things about the Blackberry is the unified messaging; there’s a single view where I can go to see all my emails, my gtalk conversations, my SMS messages, app updates, and whatever else.  No such thing exists on Android.  The closest thing is the notification bar, which requires a swipe down to use, and then only shows things that have come in since the last time you looked.  I’d prefer a more time-based list that contains both old and unread items.  Sounds like the Sony-Ericsson X10 might be doing some interesting things there, and I hope that someone figures out how to create an app like this.  What it comes down to is that anything to do with communication is faster and simpler on my Blackberry, which is really strange; you’d think Google would have spent some time working this out, as everything else about the device is far superior to my 8900.  I understand that more “enterprise oriented” customers (which apparently means those that like to use email a lot?) aren’t necessarily the target market here, but they could’ve really attacked that market with some simple work that wouldn’t have affected anything else.

The good news is that all of these are fairly straightforward software issues.  The hardware is solid, and Google has shown that they’ll do frequent upgrades of the OS.  Given that the Droid is a “Google Experience” device, those updates should find their way to the device quickly.  Some fixes, combined with getting Firefox Mobile on the Droid and other Android devices, will make this a great phone.