I will respond to your review with my review! For those for whom this will be too long to bother reading, synopsis = great phone.
I've had my Droid for 11 days. I absolutely love the phone, having come from an enV2 and my only Smartphone experience coming from the god-awful Blackberry Bold I use for work. (Phone isn't bad, AT&T is.)
I found the learning curve steep but manageable with this being my first Android phone. After just 11 days, I've figured out the tweaks and changes necessary to make the phone exactly as cool as it is capable of without rooting.
~I hate the bloatware too, but since I do not intend to root my phone, I'll just deal with it. Perhaps at least Blockbuster might become uninstallable if they really do fold soon.
~I have experienced freezes, lockups in the Gallery, and complete crashes with the phone, but I attribute that to things I did that the phone didn't like. For example, I put .mkv movie files on my SDCard to play with the RockPlayer app, and they worked, but the gallery would find them and try to preview them, thus screwing up the gallery. I've yet to figure out how to hide them from the gallery, so they're off the phone for the moment. Not a major issue.
~I've had extremely brief outages of the 3G. It tends to resolve itself fairly quickly though, but it was worrying the first time it happened (when I was sitting literally 20ft from a Verizon signal booster that is installed in my office building)
~Manipulation of the operating system and applications is NECESSARY to be satisfied with this phone, but I'm assuming that's true for all the android phones. I have over 60 applications installed, and without apps like Smart Shortcuts, Launcher Pro, and Astro File Manager, I would be lost.
~Choosing to install the facebook app for android from the market rather than using the built-in social networking thing saved me tons of grief. Now the only contacts I use are my google and phone contacts, and I don't use my google contacts often. That really simplifies the sending/receiving of things. I hated the initial settings that included all my facebook contacts in my contacts, because I'd played Mafia Wars and thus bloated my friends list to ridiculous proportions.
~Battery life has been fantastic for a smartphone. On first full charge, I had 7 hours of HEAVY use (tons of installing/uninstalling apps, browsing, gaming, etc) solid before I was down to 20% - seriously, I was sitting at my desk at work and the entire time I was there I was tinkering with the phone. On a 'normal' usage day (several texts, WordFeud, news/weather/engadget news, a call or three) I've never gotten lower than 40-50%, and often would have 60-70% battery remaining.
This is what my phone looks like now on the homepage: Featuring LauncherPro. the shortcuts in the dock are linked to my Smart Shortcuts app, and bring up Communication, Multimedia, Tools, Games, and Toys applications in that order. The 2nd row of icons in my dock (if I was to swipe it over from there) have the default dialer, contacts, app list, text, and browser shortcuts with much cooler icons than the default.
