Motorola Droid Review

Verizon needed an answer to AT&T's iPhone and Google needed a phone that showed Android could be finished software. The Droid was both. Motorola built it around a Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 running at 550 MHz with 256 MB of RAM, a 3.7-inch 854x480 screen that made the iPhone 3GS's 480x320 look coarse, and a slide-out keyboard whose flat keys and offset d-pad were the one part of the phone nobody defended.

Android 2.0 Eclair shipped on it first, and with it came free turn-by-turn Google Maps Navigation, which put the standalone GPS business on notice in a single press event. The 5 MP camera was soft, and a bug in its autofocus timer left it unable to focus for stretches of weeks until Motorola patched it. The 1400 mAh battery got through a working day only if you kept the navigation off.

Updates came properly for the era: 2.1 in the spring and 2.2 Froyo that summer, and then the trail stopped short of Gingerbread. As a phone to live with in 2009 it was good rather than great; the browser stuttered and the on-screen keyboard was poor. As a moment it was the one that made Android a platform. The Droid Does campaign sold about a million of them in the first ten weeks, at 199 dollars on a two-year Verizon contract, and every Android flagship that followed owed it the room it had made.