I did it… I finally gave up my OG Motorola Droid for a Thunderbolt. Over all I love this phone so much. I’ve been asked for some feedback and a review of the phone so here are a few things I’ve noticed in the 6 days I’ve been using the phone.

First of all I don’t find the battery life to be significantly different than my Droid. The TB has a larger screen and a lot of bloatware. If you don’t understand how to get a handle on all the apps and settings I can see how it would gobble up your battery life. I found a great list of all the little tweaks and settings changes you can make to help extend your battery life. These work for a stock (non rooted) Thunderbolt. Of course rooting gives you even more control and better battery life.

Improve battery life on Thunderbolt

There is no external camera shutter button which I sort of miss but the camera is faster, better quality and comes with some of my favorite filters and effects. It also has a timer which is pretty sweet. The front facing camera is one of the reasons I wanted the phone also but I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet. The photo quality is great.

The Thunderbolt has the Sense UI instead of the stock Android UI and there are some trade offs. The Sense gallery app is shitty IMO because it doesn’t sync to Picasa. store my photos that I want on my phone in Picasa to prevent losing them in an SD card foul up. Also if you want to share or delete you have to choose that function first and then you are prompted to choose what photos to apply this to. This seems bass ackwards to me I went to the Market and downloaded Gallery ++ which is basically the stock Android gallery.

One thing that kept me from upgrading was giving up my physical keyboard. I just wasn’t sure I could adapt. The screen on Thunderbolt is BIG and I think that plays a big part in making the virtual keyboard that much easier to use. I also use SlideIT keyboard - its a BETTER version of the Swype type keyboard. IMO Swype has always sucked and continues to suck.

Saturday I turned on the mobile wifi hotspot feature and my netbook connected to it with no problem. However after turning off the hotspot it kept turning itself back on for some reason. I finally gave up and restarted the phone and it stayed off the rest of the day. However, overnight it turned itself back on. I’m still researching this one to see if I’m missing something.

My final issue is the kickstand and USB port conflict. I’m not sure how the designers of this phone over looked this but you can’t have the phone plugged in while its on the kickstand. #Fail