I was pretty excited to go out and get my hands on a Droid yesterday. I made my way out to a local Verizon store, where a new owner was kind enough to let me play around with the phone and make a few calls. I have to say, I was pretty impressed with the device. The screen looks incredible and the whole thing operates pretty quickly. Call quality was better than my iPhone, but what isn’t. What I can’t understand, though, is why Motorola added the physical keyboard. It’s not that a hardware keyboard is a bad idea, but that keyboard is the bad idea.

Seriously, that keyboard is terrible. The keys are too close together and so difficult to push that I found myself hitting multiple keys at once pretty often. The top row is too close to the slider, making it difficult to get my thumbs in there to push. The keyboard seems even more out of place when you use the virtual keyboard. I didn’t like it as well as the iPhone, probably because of the lack of multi-touch support, but it’s the best I’ve used outside an Apple product.

The obvious conclusion is that it’s meant to be a differentiator from the iPhone. Unfortunately, it detracts from the quality of the phone, and makes it a lot thicker than is necessary. I think part of the problem is that no one wants to make anything so close to the iPhone that an exec says, “Well why wouldn’t they just buy an iPhone,” and that’s a terrible strategy. The iPhone is great, but it can be improved upon, and there are people who just want something a little different. So give them Android, but leave the pointless differentiators on the design table.

My only other problem with the phone is the Android Market. It’s still too barren to make me seriously consider a switch, even if it would mean Google Voice and Google Navigation.