I went from what some called a "phone first smart phone" in the Nokia Nuron. It ran the Symbian OS and Nokia's Ovi apps. Well, it was pretty much crap. It had some cool features and apps, but for the most part it didn't perform well and added frustration because it gave me taste of what I really wanted in a phone.

The Droid Charge is really a whole new world. I don't have anything to compare it to. I have not owned or messed with iPhones and other Android, Windows, etc. smart phones, so I can't tout this phone over any other (what I consider) high-end phones. But for me, it's awesome.

I had my contacts all backed up so I imported my contacts from my old phone to my Gmail account and set up my Gmail account on my phone and that was done.

So what did I use most often on my old phone, and how easy was it to get up and running on the Droid and how did it compare?

Calling and texting:
That was pretty simple to get used to. It was very intuitive. I quickly leaned to call and text and to create quick desktop links to my most used contacts.

Camera
There was a link to the camera app, but I had to click on "Applications" and then scroll over to get to the button, but I easily figure out how to add the button to my home screen. My old phone did have a manual button to quickly bring up the camera. I do miss that, but not a big deal to use the screen button. The quality is a million times better than my Nuron. It has an 8mp camera with another lower quality camera for self portraits and video chat. Just like my Nuron, you can  quickly send a picture to an email, text, blog, etc.

Google Maps:
There was already and app/link so that was a click.

Endomondo (workout, run/ride tracking app)
I went to their site and installed the Android app. done. I have not tried it yet, but this could be a big deal as Endomondo on my Nuron was really quirky. My times were never real accurate as I had to wait sometimes up to a minute for it to start tracking and it never seemed to get my mileage right. I'm hoping the Android version can actually show me the map during my workout. I need an armband phone holder to start using it for running. I have one on the way.

Voice Recorder:
This is where it starts to get fun. The Nuron was such junk in this regard. I used the voice recorder a lot at first because I like to record song ideas and other notes. Well the Nuron many times would jack up the audio and it was listenable. With the Droid I downloaded a free 4-track recorder. Boom!. How sweet is that?

Video Playback:
The Nuron was shit. It was unwatchable. It was pixelated, show, jerky, crap. With the Droid I plugged the phone into a USB port on my PC and dragged over 3 video files. An AVI (divx), and AVI (h.264), and an MP4 saved from YouTube. The two AVIs were HD 720 and the MP4 other was 360. They looked awesome. The phone with the video playback capabilities and screen size makes it truly a media player that I could watch movies on during boring plane and road trips.

Of course all of these apps worked even better on the Droid: Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Foursquare, etc. and just plain browsing the web is so, so much better.

Voice recognition:
And I big deal is the voice commands. they seem to work pretty good. This will come in handy in the car when trying to dial a number, text, or search Google maps. I'll  have more to say on this the more I use it, but so far it has worked pretty good.

Phone call audio quality:
The only thing that is not clearly better is the audio quality of regular old phone calls. The sounds is pretty bad, but that was what I had before. It's what I've come to expect with cell phones, but I wish it was better. That could be a Verizon issue and not phone issue.

Battery Life:
My only concern is the batty life. I have not really got a handle on how well it performs here. I will defiantly test it one a long run or bike ride. I was able to get in at least two hours on a run with the Endomondo app running with the Nuron. I hope I can get that out of the Droid.