I made the switch from my rock-solid and super dependable Verizon Blackberry Curve for two reasons: I had an upgrade come around a few months before Droid launched, and I have had Google plugged into every hole I’ve got for the last three years, so a flagship Android 2.0 phone sounded like something I could get along with.

DROID NOT SLICK, OR SEXY, OR LIGHT. DROID WILL DEFEAT GUTSMAN

My wife also had an upgrade and got the HTC Eris, her first smartphone. She got her phone first and for several days I thought about just getting an Eris, because it is also a rad phone and features HTC’s super-slick user interface, which I still sort of wish I could port to the Droid.

Where other smartphones are trying to get slicker and sexier, Droid staggers around and yells “SHUT UP COUNTRY MUSIC, LET’S PARTY.” It is all hard edges and industrial design. It is the smartphone equivalent of a muscle car: it looks like it kicks ass and then does.

Hilariously, even with that masculine design – and a full sized, slide out QWERTY keyboard – it is still the same thickness as an iPhone. This is a market-driven decision, an attempt to swipe at a demographic of long-time Blackberry users who can’t give up having a keyboard. I am willing to bet they drop it from Droid 2, because the touchscreen keyboard is excellent and far superior to those found on most other phones, even (or more properly, especially) the Blackberry Storm. The phone hardware itself works very well – call quality is great, the speakerphone is clear and loud, and the external speakers are perfectly suitable for listening to music or watching YouTube videos. With headphones, the audio fidelity and quality are quite good.

As for the software, it started out superfast and just got better with last week’s 2.0.1 Android update. Switching from app to app is seamless, everything about UI is intuitive, and you can customize how the phone handles itself as much or as little as you like. The three home screens give you plenty of real estate to set up your palette of everyday software, although I would certainly take and use more homescreens if the option were available to me.

The screen itself is vibrant, huge, and very easy on the eyes. The accelerometer accurately dictates when the screen format should change from portrait to landscape, and it does this perfectly nearly every time, regardless of what app you’re using.

The Google integration is rad, but I realize this isn’t for everyone. I’ve been keeping my calendar and address book in Google for years, and the fact that my phone instantly populated everything as soon as I logged in from setup was like the ultimate dirty data handy. It only got better with the social media integration – it paired my contact list with my Facebook account, linked the names it recognized, and outfitted their contact profiles with extra Facebook options. I didn’t even have to tell it how to do that – it just did it.

The Android app store is also plenty robust. Apple has a much higher number of apps available, but I had an iPod Touch and I can tell you that both stores share this characteristic: there’s only a few hundred apps on either store that are really well done and useful, and of those, you’re likely to only ever use a few dozen of them. I have been able to find an app for everything I have wanted to do with my Android phone, and I would classify myself as a power user.

The camera is 5 megapixels and pretty great for a smartphone. It was slow before the 2.0.1 update, but again, that’s been largely fixed. Here’s a sample of the camera dealing with a giant, backlighting window:

The Droid even came with a 16gb microSD card, which is a great bargain for the price of an upgrade plus contract extension. It isn’t like we can escape Verizon anyways – my entire family is on Verizon’s network, so if I bailed for another service I could never talk to them again. So someday when we’re all driving our Verizon to the Verizon and listening to Verizon talk about Verizon, they will at least know I had double-plus good loyalty since small times.

Speaking of driving, did you know that the Google Maps you get on Android 2.0 has turn-by-turn GPS navigation built in for free? It does. And it is amazing. That’s all you need to know – if you as a rule want something telling you where to go when you drive, this feature will sell you on Google devices forever. Not only is it a cool integration and free, it also works incredibly well. I’m pretty sure that during our Thanksgiving trip to Boston, Droid got better and more efficient at directing us around the city while we were rolling ala ZipCar. And yes, I know that this shit is how SkyNet will become sentient and start making ConstructoTents out of human skin, but in the time left until the apocalypse, I will at least know where the nearest Dunkin Donuts is and be able to get a real-time route/traffic overlay on my map. Navigator even shows you a street-view picture of your destination when you get there, so no more wondering which house or shady industrial building to approach.

For me, the bad stuff about the Droid are mainly aesthetic and accessory issues. Droid is two tiered and so the case is two-piece and while Droid is in the case it doesn’t fit in any of the cool docks available for it – like the Car Dock, that puts it in Maps / Navigator mode and enables some different phone/driving features. There’s also the Media Dock, which turns it into a clock radio / media player. These look cool, but I don’t want to pry the phone of the case every time I go to bed or get in the car.

There’s also apparently some issues with the microSD cards – when I first got my phone it crashed three times in a week and a half, requiring a battery-pull reboot. I went back to my Verizon store and asked if I’d gotten a lemon, which happens sometimes with gadgets. The tech inspected my card, saw that it was “the Japanese one” and replaced it, free of charge, with “the Chinese one.” Since then – almost a month ago now – my phone has never crashed, even though I often ask it to do several simultaneous nonsensical things at great speed.

Score

If you’re a nerd who is ready Web 3.0 or you’ve fully embraced Google as your future Day&Thought Overlords, you want a Droid, and it will set the bar really high. It is now a standard that I think most current smartphones would have a hard time meeting, although that could all change in 1Q2010. Either way, this phone is fast, smart, and capable of some amazing things.

On the High Five Scale, Droid gets a 4.5 out of 5.

And, what the hell, a Dancing Mr. T, too: