But there are weird stutters  in prominent places, too, like the little onscreen button you slide to unlock the phone, and when swiping your finger to move among the seven home screens.

The Droid X has an 8-megapixel camera with dual LED flashes. Of course, if you still believe that megapixel count is a useful metric for photo quality, help yourself to the photos from these phones. They’re fine in sunshine, but they’re sometimes washed out, and disappointing in low light.

Similarly, the ostensibly high-definition video recordings are good for a cellphone, but awful in low light. On this phone, there’s an actual tiny H.D.M.I. jack so you can connect directly to a TV to watch your latest footage (the cable costs $25). Supposedly, you can also play your video recordings, either wirelessly or, uh, wirefully, from the phone to a TV that bears the D.L.N.A. (Digital Living Network Alliance) logo. (Mine doesn’t, so I couldn’t try it.)

You can now download recent movies directly to the phone from Blockbuster ($4 for a 24-hour rental; about 90 minutes to download). Obnoxiously enough, you can’t watch them on your TV using any of those special phone-to-TV connections. The lawyers are determined to ruin everything.

What will determine your happiness most is how well you like Android software. It’s been getting steadily better through frequent updates; the speech button on the keyboard, which lets you dictate text directly into any place you could type, is just one highlight. And Motorola promises that when the next Android version appears this summer, you’ll be able to watch all Flash videos, including blinky Web ads. Take that, iPhone!

Although Android is much more open and customizable than the iPhone, it’s also more complicated and less polished. For example:

¶When you download any app from Google’s catalog (now, with 65,000 apps, about a third the size of Apple’s), you get an alarming security warning. For example: “This application has access to the following: Your location. Your personal information. Phone calls.” Yikes! What does that mean? Should you never download an app, then? How are you supposed to make that decision?

Image The Droid X is the latest “best Android phone on the market.” Credit... Jin Lee/Bloomberg News

¶The screen rotates 90 degrees when you turn the phone  but only counterclockwise, and not in all apps. Frustrating.