As the Smartphone Summer of 2010 lurches to a close, Verizon Wireless and Motorola have refreshed their product lines with the Droid 2 ($200 with a two-year contract), an update to the 10-month-old popular Droid slider phone.
It's a nice update -- the first phone to ship with Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo) -- with some good tweaks. However, after spending a few days with one, I've concluded that it's unlikely to make your heart go pit-a-pat.
Physically, the phone is nearly indistinguishable from its predecessor. At 2.4 by 4.6 by 0.5 inches, it's nearly the same size as an iPhone 4 -- just 0.1 in. thicker, thanks to the slide-out keyboard. Although, at 6 ounces, it's slightly heavier than a Droid X (again, keyboard), it's a half-inch shorter and about a quarter-inch narrower, with a 3.7-inch screen instead of the X's 4.3-inch display. It's a good size for one-handed operation.
The four function keys along the bottom are fixed-function targets rather than actual buttons that move when you press them, as they are on the Droid X; they're in slightly different order on the Droid 2 than on the original Droid.
Where pressing a physical button on the Droid X will wake that phone, one consequence of the Droid 2's buttonless buttons is that you'll need to find the hard on-off switch along the phone's top edge to wake it from sleep. And because the phone is so very rectangular, that key can be a little hard to find.
If you're devoted to single-handedness, the Droid 2 also has an excellent soft keyboard that can use the excellent Swype entry system. But the smaller size of the Droid 2 compared to the X makes the soft keyboard feel a little cramped. For this function, slightly bigger would have been slightly better.
Despite its 1-GHz processor, a significant upgrade over its 550-MHz predecessor, during testing the Droid 2 frequently felt slow and underpowered. Contact details were sometimes agonizingly slow to come up -- a particular disappointment because the software brilliantly pulls together contact information and recent activity.
Similarly, the powerful K-9 e-mail app, available for free through the Android Market, was sometimes sluggish to the point of apparently hanging. When you're standing on a street corner waiting for a taxi, you don't want to your phone software to be lagging.
Bottom Line
In the end, the Droid 2 might be more important to Verizon Wireless and Motorola than to their customers. The smartphone business moves pretty fast, and after just 10 months, the original Droid is getting a little old. The Droid 2 fills a gap in their product line: the hard-keyboard Android phone.
If you like Verizon's network and you want an Android phone with a hard keyboard, the Droid 2's your baby. But if the keyboard is negotiable and you don't mind a slightly bigger phone, you may want to step up to the Droid X.
Dan Rosenbaum, by day a search strategist and content maven, has been reviewing mobile technology since the 1990s. His MicroTAC and StarTAC phones are still in a box somewhere.
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This story, "Droid 2: A Nice Tweak" was originally published by Computerworld.