Klawchat Thursday at noon EST.

I’ll be on ESPN 1250 in Pittsburgh on Thursday at 11:40 am EST and on KNBR in San Francisco at 12:20 pm PST. Wednesday’s hit on Mike and Mike is now online, although my voice doesn’t sound very clear. And on that note…

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So my Blackberry Curve stopped making any sounds last week, which meant no ringer on the phone and no alarm on the, uh, alarm, and after a year of getting annoyed with how difficult it was to access the Web even with the superior Opera browser (the Blackberry’s native browser was apparently coded in 1997), I decided to upgrade to a Droid – specifically, the Motorola DROID A855, which is just $50 if you get a new account with Verizon but $529
without the plan. Several of you asked me for thoughts on the phone, so here goes:

* Web browsing rocks. Clear, simple, and compatible with most sites so far. Happiest with this feature by far. In fact, switching applications and moving within applications, all of which is accomplished by tapping or sliding a finger on the screen, is easy and intuitive, and I’ve experienced no lags.

* The screen quality is absurd. This is far, far easier on my eyes than any other phone I’ve seen. Video quality is also very high.

* Pretty good set of productivity apps available. I guess this doesn’t quite compare to the apps available on the iPhone, but given time I think they’ll catch up, and while I’m disappointed that I can’t get Zooloretto on the Droid yet it’s hardly the end of the world.

* Sound quality from the speakers sucks but is better through headphones. It’s still not replacing my iPod, but it’s serviceable.

* Typing sucks. There are three options for typing – a slide-out landscape keyboard, a virtual landscape keyboard, and a virtual portrait keyboard, with the latter two depending on how you’re holding the phone. The virtual portrait keyboard is awful – the key size is appropriate for my three-year-old daughter’s hands. The true keyboard is awkwardly spaced and doesn’t play well with the protective case I bought for the device, which overlaps with the tops of the first row of keys. The virtual landscape keyboard combined with the Droid’s predictive-typing feature works best, but I think I’m only typing at about 75% of the speed I could achieve on the Curve. (I could type on the Curve with my eyes closed, which will never happen with the Droid.) A better mechanical keyboard design would have remedied this.

* I don’t think the call quality on the phone is as clear as it’s been on phones I’ve had before, although I haven’t had trouble completing calls or with calls dropping. I don’t know if the issue on Mike & Mike was my phone, my location, or both.

* The worst feature is the Sync feature, where Google syncs your contacts with … I don’t know, the master server in California where they hold all the data in the world so that they can continue to control our lives through radio waves directed at our cerebral cortices. When it’s syncing, your contacts may become temporarily unavailable, and if the sync fails, you are SOL until it syncs successfully. It’s just a stupid idea – the Contacts should reside on the phone and be accessible at all times.

Despite all those flaws, I do like the phone, since the way I use my phone has changed so much over the last two years. The ability to look things up or stay on top of information has become as important as the ability to communicate outward through the device, but that balance will vary depending on your job and travel schedule.

Also, I’ve found these apps to be useful so far:

* chompSMS. A solid management system for text messages.

* NewsRob. Excellent RSS reader.

* Seesmic. Pretty intuitive Twitter client.

* Google Maps. Impressive. If the voice giving the directions didn’t sound like a computer-generated voice from 1976, it would be a viable replacement for a GPS device.

* RingDroid. I made my own ringtone from Handsome Boy Modeling School’s “Rock and Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This).” Win.

* Pandora. I used this once for an hour and its selections were pretty good despite the fact that I had only uploaded eight songs to my Droid.

* Secrets. Password-protected password storage.

* WaveSecure. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean Google isn’t after me.

I’ve downloaded several others, included MLB At Bat, Astro Player, Shazam, and Urbanspoon, but haven’t used them enough to comment.

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Unrelated, but if any of you have new suggestions for Phoenix-area eats, I’m all ears. We’re staying in Scottsdale and most of my travels will keep me near the various major league parks, with one brief detour to Tucson.