Conclusion
The Droid 2 is a well-built phone and a decent improvement from the original (especially in the keyboard department). I doubt (and probably wouldn’t recommend) that original Droid owners will be rushing out to upgrade if they aren’t already eligible for an upgrade on their line, but new users will be getting an improved experience. Motorola certainly doesn’t have a game changer here, but it’s a decent phone that many are sure to enjoy. For me, it fits in the hands better than the Droid X, and the keyboard is useful, but definitely not recommended for anything involving heavy punctuation. Flash playback is abysmal for the most part unless you happen to find a player that works with it, but even then you’ll likely want to smash your phone on the ground once you try to use the controls of the video player. Flash is better at bringing Flash ads into the browser than it is at providing a usable Flash experience. The Droid 2 is also somewhat lacking in the camera department as it won’t do 720p HD video recording which current top-tier phones support, and the still photos won’t beat a well researched point-and-shoot.
I have a Motorola Droid 1 and was hoping for the Droid 2 to have better Adobe Flash support. I even resorted to overclocking it to 1.1 GHz and video playback performance on the non-mobile optimized videos were just a little better.
If only there was something better than Flash. HTML5 doesn’t support encryption (DRM and all that) so most of the sites I visit to watch videos won’t be using HTML5 anytime soon.
Hopefully Flash becomes more resource efficient (not something Adobe is famous for) and/or these future faster ARM chipsets like dual core Cortex-A9 will be powerful enough for Flash.
For me, performance was probably less of an issue than the lack of usable controls/interfaces, but it is incredibly annoying that a YouTube video may playback just fine one minute, then is suddenly start running terribly (same video) with no explanation.