From iPhone intention to Droid X

I had every intention of moving to the iPhone 4. The user interface, camera, and design are all clearly top-notch. Antenna glitch aside, it's a stunning piece of engineering. And then... AT&T happened. I had an old 'AT&T blue' data account and SIM, and the back-end order systems which manage migration have bitten me before. In this case, they busted during the iPhone 4 initial release frenzy. On top of that, AT&T had massive challenges (9 months of incorrect billing) on my business land-line account. Finally, my attempts to use the Nexus One on AT&T, watching every other call never reach the handset, convinced me I was destined to switch carrier.

In a more ideal world I would have chosen between the iPhone 4 and the Droid X on Verizon - but in 2010 AT&T remains the only iPhone 4 carrier and the choice is already made. Droid X it was to be.

The Droid X is a fine phone and very capable smartphone device. I am impressed by the display, the soft keypad, and by the range of Android widgets and apps. The camera is the only bit of dirt in the sauce. While billed at 8MP of resolution, images look distinctly soft even when taken in bright light. A small 1:1 sample of a document image gives a good idea of what you can expect.

Downscaling the image as a point of reference, the 'true resolution' is closer to 3MP with the remainder being noise and blur. On the positive side, the images are not mangled by excessive in-camera sharpening, so a certain amount of post-processing (unsharp mask for instance) can yield slightly more appealing results.

This is yet another classic case of wasted pixels though. Had Motorola done their homework and selected a good 5MP module as Apple did, a significantly better camera could have emerged. As it is, I'll be enjoying the data-centric side of this phone while still fondly remembering the camera in my now-venerable Nokia N95.....