Motorola DROID 2 Global Android Phone, White (Verizon Wireless)

My best phone yet. March 30, 2011

Reviewer:  David C. Sweet "David"  (RI) -

I have been using my Droid 2 Global for 2 months The battery was an issue early on, but I bought the Motorola extended battery and am satisfied with the battery life now. I'm usually at 60-70% after 10 hours light use. The battery charges fast. I charge every night and always have no matter what phone I've had. The screen is bright and crisp. Sunlight washes it out just like you would expect. Call quality is good. The speakerphone is good. The phone has a multicolored led indicator for messages. I got a case with the phone, but don't use it because it interfered with the top row of keys. I like the keyboard and can't imagine not having one. The feel of the keys is not as good as my last phone, but still quite good. The camera is ok. I don't expect to be producing any artwork with it. This is the first smart phone I've had where I felt the internet was usable. Download speeds are not painful. I wouldn't surf for hours on it because of the screen size. Pages are rendered well. This is my first Android phone. Learning the system did take some time, just like any new OS would. I was able to make and receive calls, texts, and get on the internet before leaving the store. I have found new apps to replace the ones on my old phone. Moving music to the phone was easy. When using the phone and a text field opens up, you usually have the option to press the microphone button and dictate the text. The phone does a good job with speech to text. It's not quicker than typing, but is sometimes easier. If you use Google services ( Gmail, calendar, tasks, picasa, voice, or talk) they are very well integrated with Android. I like having a lanyard attached to my phone so I can keep it in my breast pocket and not have it fall out. There is no lanyard connection on the phone, so I have had to make my own. If you want a phone with a keyboard I would recommend this phone. Smart phones are about the applications on them. Here is list of my important ones.
Note Everything Pro (notes)
Atakephone (dialer)
Handcent (texting)
Google Voice
aCar (vehicle manager)
Documents to Go ( Excel and Word)
Gtasks ( google tasks)
Splash ID (password storage)
Palringo (chat)
Facebook
Yahoo mail
Glympse ( location sharing)
CSipSimple (voip)
Kindle (ereader)
Endomondo ( traker)
Roku remote (remote control)
Logmein Ignition ( remote control of PC)
Checkbook ( checkbook register)
Beautiful Widgets ( screen widgets)
Shake to answer ( title says it all)

Go Global or Go Home! February 10, 2011

Reviewer:  C. Waters "XT250"  (North Dakota) -

After years as a dedicated BlackBerry (BB) user, I decided it was time for a change. Advertisement after enticing advertisement promised me a quicker, more Internet-friendly workhorse of a smart phone known as the Droid 2. The high tech commercials were intended for me! It I had to have one! I could not live without it! I convinced my husband that it was the best thing since peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the next night I had my Droid. As I held my new Motorola Droid 2 Global phone in my sweaty palm, I felt myself salivate.
It was everything I imagined and more. I connected to the Internet on a 3G network and within no time had bonded with my Droid. The touchscreen keyboard and screen auto-rotation had my full attention as I continued to play. I personalized the seven home screens with my favorite application icons. I could group them by kind and reposition them. It felt more like a touchscreen computer than a phone. It was definitely "smarter" than my BlackBerry! I downloaded various free applications from the "Market" and was impressed with the variety, download times, and ease of installation. The battery lasted the entire day without needing to be charged and there were several battery options to conserve energy. A free car charger and USB cord for tethering were supplied with the Droid. I agree with the majority of other reviewers. Go Global or go home!

Holy Awesomeness Batman! March 27, 2011

Reviewer:  S.T. Pretl 

I'll make this short and to the point... YES, the battery life can, at times, be short. So far, that hasn't been an issue for me since I'm big about it being on the charger when it's not in use. EVERYTHING else about the phone is AWESOME! I will say that the white is not a bright white but an off white. Not that that is a big deal though. The apps are fantastic. My 3 year old son LOVES the kid apps I have. I LOVE that the kid apps are educational and not at all inappropriate for his age range. I would have to say that if you want a smartphone, get this one and you will not be at all sorry (so long as you go in knowing that the battery can go quickly if you're always on some app or another).

Droid 2 Global great smartphone. February 22, 2011

Reviewer:  Bryan M. Vance 

I have recently bought my Droid 2 Global (Winter White Edition) from AmazonWireless. After about a week of putting this phone through its paces I have almost nothing but high praises for the the phone. I love the keyboard, it is simply amazing. Just the right amount of curvature to the buttons, plenty of bounce and quite firm. The screen is glorious also. It is pretty zippy, and seems to fly through apps, and we browsing with ease. Haven't had any real problems with it freezing or crashing. The speaker quality while not great is still better than average and certainly livable. The Motorola UI is pretty clean and simple. However the Social Networking app needs to have more settings. Also the notepad widget isn't the best because unless you can pin it to your homescreen their doesn't seem to be any way to save the notes. An extra home screen or two would have been great but the 7 work just fine.

However there is one major flaw with this phone....the battery life is atrocious! I am lucky to get 5 hours of just moderate use out of a charge. So if you buy this phone, definitely get either an extended battery or do what I did and buy a few OEM battery's and a stand alone charger. The phone just sucks down power, and even with the help of power saving apps it still barely lasts five hours with moderate use (some texting one or two sub 5 minute calls, maybe 25 mins of facebook and 20 of twitter and some misc use of other apps.)If you want to use it as a GPS, say goodbye to the battery....because it will drain it in a zip!

Other than that I can't really complain, oh yeah besides it not having an 8mp camera.

Pros:
Beautiful phone
Full QWERTY keyboard
Fast
FAST!!!
Simple clean UI
Comes preloaded with a Office app

Cons:
Horrible battery life
Buttons on side of phone can be hard to use at times
Could have used larger internal storage and a larger camera

My lucky Day May 9, 2011

Reviewer:  Steven  (Boston, Ma) -

Review: 13 May
I have owned the Droid 2 for awhile and am just now getting around to writing a review. So I guess that means I have put the phone through some thouorgh tests and use, get to know your phone! I bought it most for its communications capibilities.

The Droid 2 Global is my first smart phone, maybe it should be called a hand held computer that can make phone calls. These are my views and evaluation of the mentioned smartphone.

I have found this phone to have a excellent operating system and many capabilities not phone related, so this evaluation will first start in the area of phone use: The voice command is excellent, the first thing I do with my new Droid in the morning is talk to it - I say: "check status" it comes back and tells me what: the signal strength is, missed calls, any messages, and time and date, these are a few of the status messages. If there are any missed calls all I need to do is say "check missed calls" and am brought to missed calls list, and have the option to delete any recent calls quite easily and/or call back. To to switch to received/outgoing calls is quite easy, just touch the missed calls bar and change. I have found the dialer very user friendly with the easy option to go to recent calls list, contacts, or favorites. Also on the dialer screen there is a option for voice command connection. What I really like about the contacts (phone book) is it can be used similar to a palm with a area for addresses, and I am able to add as many phone numbers as I care to for any given contact - with the option to customize the phone number name that is recognized by voice command. It just keeps getting better - there is the option of being able to link an email to the contact entry, never had problems checking email(AOL) or sending. For those that like talk to text this phone has that option. I will try and not be a bore with a lot more phone stuff, but there is one thing that is worth mentioning: all calls for that contact can be viewed with just a swipe to the right, the list will tell if a given call was missed, received, outgoing, or text.

The capabilities of the Driod smart phone are to numerous, forgive me if I leave anything out. This evaluation is mostly what I personally use the most; I will try and not be too long winded, so I will just list a few of the other things I like and the overall operation experience. To start I like the option to be able to populate my home screen with icons/widgets that are used the most by me. To list a few: the GPS map, Navigator, browser, voice command, voice mail, email, and the calculator, misic & games. Most of the options listed are self-explanatory, but there are two the need further recognition: I find the map to be very handy, the gps always telling me where I am. The navigator is equally handy with the voice actions of where I want to go, for example; I want to go to the post office the navigator will ask me which one from a give a list, once I select the correct one, a route is mapped out, and the navigator also tells me when to turn. Honorable mention: the browser is quit good, the search engine is run by google.

The battery life for the droid seems to be a issue for the droid so I will give it attention of one paragraph: First it seems the phone uses a lot of juice with all the radios in operation - putting the phone in airport mode will disable all wireless communication - good for: meetings/airport/do not disturb. One of the best options from the "setting" menu is "battery manager" which I use quite often. This piece of electronic equipment is a smart phone and runs appls in the background just like a micro computer; at firt I was just like anyone else and when the battery ran low quicker then expected I got irritated. So where am I going with this? The battery manager shows battery use in % of "voice calls", "display", "Android OS", etc... After checking the "battery manager" a few times a day I changed my thinking on the battery life being a problem. This phone being used as a phone could last more then one day with proper care - I charge my phones at night even if is at 50%? I have found that if the % of battery used for display or other things is double what it is for "phone use" maybe a extended battery needs to be consider. My mind set was changed: if my "hand held computer" (smartphone) only lasts 4 to 6 hours would I grumble? Personally if my laptops battery lasted 4 to 6 hours I would jump up and down for joy.

The last part of evaluation is the overall operation of the Driod 2 Global. It is hard for a person to focus on that it is a phone that does other things. It has a excellent operating system and does act a lot like a microcomputer: when turned on it boots up, can connect to the web, runs applications in the background, games can be played on it, and then there is email, lets not forget it is a phone. At first use, the screen saver blanking out the screen more then I wanted it to, this was a little irritating, but once "settings" was accessed I change the screen saver to two minutes - my personal preference. This is my first smart phone and having a phone sleep is new. A handy option is: that it will automatically put the phone in sleep mode when put in a pocket or its case, when set - a good idea. Most times when I take my droid out of the case it wakes up, and all I have to do is unlock it. Otherwise to wake it up, my personal preference is slide out the keyboard, other folk may have there own preference. Over all this is a great phone with a excellent OS which is updated periodically I have observed. The only thing that it has done unexpectedly: without warning it went into sleep mode and the screen blanked out, all I did was slide the keyboard out and it came right back to what I was doing. I will have to admit that sometimes I have had to swipe a button/icon more than once with my finger, but I can live with that. The Droid 2 has never frozen up on me, but my guess is if it does freeze it can be woke up by just slide out the keyboard and then sliding back in, the buttons should work again.

Maybe there is a Zen lesson to be learned here. It is said that: Zen lessons are not about cause and effect. They are about what you knew all along; about learning by forgetting what you thought you had learned. Confused? Ok consider getting a new smart phone and all you have to compare it to is a laptop or a apple ipad, we may think it works just like that other one. Then a person may think their smart phone is rebooting when it is not(sleep mode), or it is freezing up because there lap top froze in a similar manner. There is a saying: "empty your cup" do not bring any of your judgments from other phones/computers here, and learn the capabilities of the droid like it is the first.

Pros: Dialer/contacts, Voice command, settings/battery manager.
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Cons: some bluetooth do not work for all phone options, smarter bluetooth needed. A2ADP pairing seem to be a good choice.
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Update 13 June: ---
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Here it is one month later and am reporting some of the many capabilities of this phone in more detail. First I will discuss the battery: I am now using a appl called battery guard this will kill any applications running in the background, and you are able to decide which should be killed from a long list. Look in market place or widgets for Motorola or android - to get these put your finger on any blank space on any of the 7 home screens. This has given me up to 70% more battery life.

A little bit more about the battery for those folk that are to busy to read between the lines when it comes to battery use. Most people like the idea that a smart phone can multi-task, the droid 2 is no different. I find that it will run yourtube, play music, run the GPS, and I can search; all are running at the same time like. I am like most by just hitting home for a new appl - this does not kill the previous one(s) used, so for me to figure out which are draining the battery the most I do not bother), I just run "battery guard." On the average my battery will be down to 30-40% after 13 to 23 hours use - this depends on the amount of use. One day the battery was down to 15% after 6 hours of use. (I forced this)

I have been using voice command/actions pretty regular and think the this is truly a smart phone: for voice action I can say "send message to Eddie - this is a test" and the phone brings up the text message screen with all the info already for review, all I most times need to do is send. This phone also knows the difference between a voice search vs. a voice email. I am thinking about investing in the new Droid CommandOne blue tooth, and truly use voice hands free for answering and sending text as well as making and sending calls.

I agree with others when they say get to know your phone!!!
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