I think it’s pretty much required that when you get one of these things you have to post about it, Uncle has so that’s what I’m going to do.

I picked one up 5 days ago and I’ve been beating the snot out of it since then. Overall I like it but I have a couple of complaints.

The big one is WiFi support. Worked great for two days and then it got spotty. At home over that first weekend I’d see that it lost the WiFi connection and reverted to the 3G connection. On Monday night things got really crazy and it’d remain connected to my WiFi network but refuse to actually communicate unless it was one of the Google applications. Strangest thing in the world. Usually I can make sense of the WTF issues in consumer devices like this but my mind boggles at what is going on there. Gmail works, Pandora, Last.fm, Facebook, dead. Maybe, sometimes, kinda sorta, works one minute fails the next. Not cool. I even plugged in a 10 year old 802.11b access point of mine to see if it worked better with that instead of my 802.11n router that everything else uses. No dice. Same goofy experience there.

I’ve given up on WiFi and I’m just going to roll with 3G connectivity until I hear about an update being pushed out or WiFi is my only choice for getting data. It’s that bad, and I’m not the only one out there having problems with it.

Also, the physical keyboard sucks. Not that any keyboard that size is going to be great but this is worse than trying to type on my LG nV2 There’s no space between the keys which makes it hard to tell if you’re on the right button or not. I realize they have space constraints but shrinking the buttons 10% in each direction would have helped and that pointer thingy they have on the right side of the keyboard has no use to me. I’d imagine it’s pretty big for gaming though. Dropping the pointer control would have given them a lot of room to make it more friendly for business users. In addition with no room between the top row and the display means typing with my thumbs is kinda pointless. Even with my tiny girl hands I trouble wedging a thumb in there so I hunt around with a single index finger on the thing. I’ll probably adapt quickly.

The default on screen keyboard is decent though. Well, for an on screen keyboard. Plus you can get different plugins to change how it works. A good friend suggested ShapeWriter and I’ve started to tinker with it. I kind of like the idea but I’m not so sure about it. Still, nice to know there are options out there.

And, for all the griping I did above about the WiFi connectivity the 3G support has been pretty good. I pull about 1.5Mb/s out here in the country where I live. Inside an office building in town the signal degrades to the point where I only get 256Kb/s (sometimes closer to 128Kb/s) but that’s enough to stream music over it which is all I really need it for aside from synching up calendars and such.

Speaking of which, it hooks up to Exchange just fine. No hassle there at all. Email, calender, and contacts come over great. Likewise with the Google services that fill a similar role that I make use of in my personal life.

Speaking of contacts I’m greatly annoyed that Verizon doesn’t have an app to sync up to their Backup Manager stuff. I transitioned seamlessly between two LG phones because I always used their Backup Manager to keep my contact list on their server but they didn’t bother writing an app for the Android system to pull that data back down. Consequently I’m going to have to pull up my contact list on the Verizon website some night and start plugging phone numbers back in. But, that’s a Verizon issue and not a Google/Android/Motorola Droid issue. Wife had the same problem when she got a Microsoft based smart phone from Verizon. There’s no app for that. :(

Also of note is that this thing sucks on the battery hard. If you actually use it as anything besides a simple cell phone and have that display light up on a regular basis you’re going to have to charge it every day. The nice thing there is that the charger is a simple micro USB cable so I can just jack it into my work laptop during the day without any fuss. While it’s a gripe of mine I cannot fault anybody for this. Making the thing any bigger to hold a larger battery would have been suicide-by-market-demand and there’s not much you can do about toning down the power consumption.

Aside from the physical keyboard and the battery life every other issue I have can be addressed via a software update. I like that and I’m optimistic that Google will fix up the OS eventually. It’s still kind of new and already works way better than the Windows Mobile 6.0 device my wife was torturing herself with for the last 18 months and with that one she only wanted it to work as a phone. I’m getting way more functionality out of the Droid than she ever had with that.

Now, one thing I really like about the Droid is the ability to set a “swipe pattern” on the screen to take it out of sleep mode. I’ve seen enough Facebook status updates that read, “I have a buttplug in my behind today at work!” published by a Blackberry to understand the importance of not having an easily unlockable phone.

Problem is while I like that feature I want this thing to be really easy to work with while driving. Yes, I’ll read an SMS message or email header while going down the expressway if traffic is light. Hell, even if you’re just doing it at a red light it needs to be fast. The security, or even the default “wake up” procedure, gets in the way of this. With the GPS capabilities of the device it has to be possible to simply drop the thing into the “I’m driving, show my my stuff” mode. If my phone chimes that I have an SMS message, and I’m doing north of 25mph within the last 60 seconds, I should be able to pick up the phone and see the message. No unlock required. Not everybody would like it so just drop it on Android as an option: Easy access on the go. You tell me I got an email while I’m moving? Pull up that email for me if I’m driving. Keep it there until I dismiss it when I hit the next red light or empty stretch of the highway.

Oh, and if you made it this far in my blog post you’re probably interested in the Droid so here’s a random tidbit for you: If the phone is on mute but you have the dial pad on the screen your cheek will hit buttons on the phone and they will transmit DTMF tones to the call. Learned that on my first conference call with the thing. You dial in, dial pad goes away, you call it back up to enter the conference number, hit mute, and your coworkers wonder who the idiot was making the beeping noises.