Droid smartphone good but not great

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Motorola's new Droid smartphone has attracted a fair amount of attraction as quite possibly the toughest challenger yet for the iPhone.

It's the first phone to run Android 2.0, the latest version of Google's smartphone operating system. It's the first Android phone offered by Verizon, which is reputed to have the best wireless network in the nation.

And it's the first Android phone available in the United States that has taken the iPhone's aesthetic into account in its design: The Droid is thin but sturdy and places its large touch screen front and center.

But as much as the Droid improves on previous Android phones, it's still no iPhone. Both its hardware and software lack the refinement of Apple's iconic device.

The first thing you notice about the Droid is that it feels solid in your hand. Unlike the myTouch 3G, the Android phone that came out this summer on T-Mobile, the Droid doesn't feel like it's made of cheap plastic. On the other hand, it weighs about an ounce more than my iPhone, and that difference was noticeable as I held it in my hands surfing the Web or typing e-mail.

Unlike the iPhone, the Droid has a slide-out keyboard. The keys were small for my thumbs, but they give a satisfying sensation when you tap on them.

Unlike previous Android phones, the Droid doesn't have a trackball or any physical buttons on its face. Instead, it has four dedicated touch-sensitive buttons: back, menu, home and search. I found these hard to use. Because they don't depress like physical buttons and don't change color like virtual touch-screen ones, it can be hard to know if you've pressed them or not, particularly if the phone is running slowly for some reason. This kept happening to me repeatedly.

And when the screen turned off, I found myself missing having a big, front-facing button to turn it back on. Touch the "home" button (as you would on the iPhone), and nothing happens. Instead, you have to press the tiny power button on the top of the device.

The software on the Droid includes some nice features. It's one of the first Android phones to be able to sync to Exchange right out of the box, so you can not only check your work mail, but download your work contacts and calendar. Like Palm's Pre and the new Motorola Cliq, it also syncs your contacts with Facebook.

As you'd hope, given the Droid's links to Google, its search feature is much improved from those on previous Android phones. On the myTouch, the search bar only performed Web searches. Now it will search the device as well. You can use it to locate and launch programs and look up contacts.