Here's my 2 cents:
Got my Droid on November 12th after 2 years of using a Blackberry 8830 World Edition:
1. how do you find the hardware (comfort of use, ease of use)?
The touchscreen to me is very responsive and had no problem going from the BB to this phone. The screen is beautiful; videos and web pages look really good on it. Having not had a camera on my phone for 2 years, I can't really compare it to anything else (my last phone with a camera was a Treo 650) but after the 2.0.1 update, taking pictures has been a lot better, although the image quality is still off when it comes to colors and low-light pictures (don't really expect much from a camera phone though, even if it is 5MP). I've used both the slide-out keyboard and the on-screen keyboard and both take some getting used to. Gotten better with the slide-out, but it still pales in comparison to the BB. The touchscreen keyboard can't really keep up with how fast I want to type so I find myself typing a little slower to ensure the keypresses register (the auto-correct feature though is pretty good in correcting minor mistakes).
2. how do you find the battery life (everyday light/normal use, heavy use)?
I consider myself a pretty heavy user (I use it for work calls, personal emails, and get a decent amount of texts per day) and with this Droid (first one died on me) it's 100% charged in the morning and by the time I go to sleep (10-10:30) it's about 20%. If I don't make a bunch of calls it's probably around 35-40%, and I think that if I left it on without charging could probably make it through the next morning before the battery really got low. My 8830 would last 2-3 days but didn't have as heavy use (I find myself surfing the web a LOT more with the Droid)
3. if you we're a BB user and switched up to give Android a test, what do you like and not like about it?
Gotta LOVE the browser compared to the BB. Never tried out mobile Opera or Bolt since I didn't have much space left on the 8830 (had maybe 9 MB free). I REALLY miss BB Messenger though. Just got 5.0 working on the 8830 before I got the Droid and really liked the differences compared to the old one. Using GMail as my primary email is a plus for the Droid (Duh) but it doesn't seem to handle other email accounts nearly as well (I tend to get a lot of multiple notifications for old email that I've read from my Hotmail account). Tried to get it to work on my work Exchange and the Droid just couldn't get it to configure itself properly. Whereas I know that if I signed up for BES service with Verizon, it would work without issue. I also really miss the auto-on/off feature from the BB. There are options for the Droid, but none of them give the true feature that was available on the BB. I will say though that the Android OS seems a lot snappier and responsive than BB 4.5. Not having to do a battery pull to free up memory is a BIG plus as Android natively manages memory a lot better than BB does.
4. what are the must have apps? how does the device do with running them all?
Don't really have too many apps running in the background but I've installed the following:
SMS Popup - Great SMS alternative to the native notification service
SNESoid - Probably the only true use of the DPad on the Droid and all the games render beautifully on the screen
Astro File Manager - Manages apps and files on the phone and SDCard
Remember the Milk - Astrid does the same thing for free but having paid for the Pro version, syncs up with all of the fields that I use
Google Voice, Listen, and Goggles - All great apps that sync well with Android
PDA Net - Allows USB tethering
5. how do you go about loading up the device with media (music, movies, etc.)
I just hook it up to the computer and drag and drop using Windows Explorer. I have DoubleTwist installed on my computer and that seems to be an for auto-sync, but I don't really like it since the only thing that I'd like to auto-sync would be the podcasts I listen to (DoubleTwist doesn't do podcasts like iTunes does)
6. with all that, i want to know your background - are you in business (using it for professional use), a consumer, a student, young, old, male, female, etc.
I'm a 31 yr old male using it mainly for personal use (some calls and emails sent to my gmail account and Remember the Milk are the extent of my professional use for the phone)
All in all, I really like this phone and now that I have it rooted, I'm pretty excited at the idea of custom ROMS that will allow for 2.1 to be ported to it with an HTC sense UI feel as well as multi-touch ability to be enabled for the different apps.
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