One Month with a Milestone

Motorola Milestone (aka: Droid) is not only my first Android OS experience, but it's also my first smart-phone.
Android is remarkable in its ability to be entirely unremarkable. At first I was concerned that my new phone did not come with any substantial documentation. But this worry quickly evaporated as I got used to Android's "if you don't see it, it's probably nothing to bother with" attitude.

For example: you never really quit an app. Instead you just leave and do something else. Android will allocate resources on the fly as required.

However, it does lend itself to some unusual quirks. Some of these quirks, I still haven't decided if they're bugs or actual features. The strangest thing that occurs is the auto-resume of media play-back. After a month of seemingly normal operation, this actually happened to me just a few days ago: an MP3 just started playing while I used the phone for something else. I had to switch back the media player, and press the Play button twice: first to reset it to its "play" position, then back to the "pause." This is the foremost irritation of the that "if you don't see it" attitude. You never shut down a function. The MP3 player is never "stopped."

As for the phone's performance, after my first month with the device, I'm fairly pleased with it. Little issues such as unintentional key-presses to the touch-screen, I can blame on myself for being butter-fingered. This is, thankfully, a far-cry from the recent hold-your-iPhone-the-wrong-way-and-lose-signal-strength gaffe. Normal voice is crisp and clear-sounding.
I'm loving the slide-out keypad. It's a nice clicky-feedback for typing a reasonable length email or messaging or tweeting. Overall, it's surprising how comprehensive connected-life with a smart-phone could be. I even got comfortable traveling without my laptop once I had the Facebook and Twitter apps installed. Browsing over wi-fi is great, but 3G is a bit over-rated.

I've only had a few glitches (which will blame on Android rather than the phone itself).

First: there's the weird misfire resume-media I described above. I'm told it's a feature that's supposed to kick in when you hang-up a phone call (because an incoming call automatically pauses currently-playing media).

Second: I don't know why typing a "hyphen" on the keypad doesn't always advance my cursor. I end up putting a hyphen at the end of two joined words instead of between them.
Third: Too many photos on the phone seems to give the media gallery trouble indexing the photos. I reached about 50 pictures taken with the camera (which by the way is a respectable 5.0Mpx) when I noticed I had trouble browsing them. I have since transferred them to my laptop through the Micro-USB cable.

Which brings me to a final and out-of-the-way side observation before I end this post. Motorola got clever with their included cable: their version of the micro-USB plug includes a couple of extra nubs to make it snug to the port on the phone. I only noticed this after getting a spare cable from monoprice which turned out to be slightly too loose causing an unreliable connection (a drop of super-glue to add just a touch of thickness to the plug fixed that problem).

Overall, I've been very pleased with my first smart-phone experience. Now to simply wait for Android to mature a bit and hopefully solved these glitches.