Noah Lemas

On November 6, the day of its premier, I went and picked up the Droid. Even though I generally fancy myself an early adopter, I had largely avoided the mobile phone game. I had never paid for a mobile phone before and had never really been all that excited about them. I had a BlackBerry that was given to me, and I used it for a couple of years but remained generally indifferent.

All of that changed for me with the release of the Droid. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was sort of excited about the iPhone but, simply, it wasn’t available here in Bend. So I patiently waited for something to come along.

That something turned out to be the Droid. Before AT&T could get their act together and bring their network to Bend, Motorola and Verizon dropped the Droid. Already being drunk on the Google Kool-Aid, it seemed like a no-brainer. My friend and colleague, Ben Goodsell brought his Droid into the office the day of its release and that’s all it took. I went AWOL and dropped into Best Buy and, voila, dropped some ching on a mobile for the first time ever.

I won’t bore you with my app strategy or any of my nerdy obsessions, but I will say that I am overwhelmingly satisfied with the Droid but for two features. First, the camera is awful…washed out, blurry pictures are more the norm than the exception and no matter how hard I try, the thing just won’t take good pictures consistently. Second, the slide-out Qwerty keyboard is garbage. Or my thumbs are. Or all three are. I’ve given up on the thing and just type using the landscape touch keyboard.

Other than those issues, I’m thrilled with the thing.