[Verizon Droid Charge] skuzz:
FWIW, I've used over the last few years:

G1, Droid, Droid X, DINC, ThunderBolt, Nexus S, Nexus One, HTC Hero, Eris, Galaxy S i9000, iPhone 1-4, various Symbian and WinMo phones not worth mentioning, Nokia i900, Pre, Pre Plus, Pre 2, Pixi, BlackBerry 8700,8800,8900,9000,95xx,96xx,97xx and probably others I'm forgetting.

Of all of them my favorite was probably the DINC or iPhone 3Gs/4 but the old-tech OLED screen on the DINC made it unusable in sunlight, and iPhone isn't "open" enough.

So far the Droid Charge has been a good handset for me. I live in an LTE market, I get about a day of usage (texting throughout the day, maybe one or two short phone calls, email, web browsing, no gaming to speak of) on the standard battery, about 1.5-2 days on extended battery.

I'm not a fan of TouchWiz, but it's not HORRIBLE. That said, I use LauncherPro instead of TWLauncher, so that says what it says about TW.

The color scheme is barfey, whoever thought brown was a good highlight color doesn't understand what color poop is. The GPS doesn't seem to be anywhere near as fast as the DINC and majorly slower than iPhone, although CoreLocation on iPhone is pretty darn robust and so far hard to touch. (From a technical standpoint, not trying to flamewar.)

The keyboard is ok, I use the Gingerbread Keyboard from the market now though with the theme that makes the keys light gray so they're easier to see outdoors.

I'm rooted mostly just so I can use AdBlock Plus, I don't use it for any of my main UI mods.

I'm running ED1 and haven't seemed to have many problems with voice or data, other than the usual LTE glitchiness from Verizon's network messing up requiring a reboot at times. (ThunderBolt and LTE HotSpot will suffer similar issues around the same time so I don't blame the handset specifically.)

Biggest pet peeve: NO SIMULTANEOUS VOICE AND DATA ON 3G. I thought this was part of their new "4G is the future, SIM cards rule, and you can do SVDO on all LTE handsets" push...but apparently not. On 3G-only mode, no SVDO, and on 3G/4G mode when on a 3G-only network....no SVDO. Major bummer. Sure it could be fixed with a radio update later, but either way, LAME. Thankfully I'm on LTE most of the time so it doesn't matter TOO much, but just seems like a marketing fail.

HDMI out video mirroring is SWEET. I use that feature quite a bit when traveling. Video playback is much more reliable than other Android handsets I've tried in the past when playing various codecs.

I don't really notice the slowdown many complain about in regular day-to-day usage, except when the phone runs out of RAM and has to reload the launcher or keyboard or other things that got punted out of RAM. Sucks they only put 512MB in it when the ThunderBolt has 768MB, but I also remind myself it's a freaking computer, stuff sometimes has to be reloaded into RAM when RAM runs out.

Stock app bloat is absolutely disgusting. I never saw much battery life difference with vs without the bloat apps (as I never used any of them) and I used LauncherPro to hide them, but I do like having root and being able to freeze them in TB. Screw Verizon for dumping so much bloat on their handsets though without any easy removal. That's just Evil™.

I hate that there is no good video chat app that uses the front facing camera, but it is rather new tech.

The headphone jack EQ settings are pretty sweet. They work good enough that I don't have to keep trying to load DSPManager like I normally did on my HTC handsets.

Earpiece audio and speakerphone audio I feel are unacceptable. They distort too easily, The old thin i9000 Galaxy S phone could be cranked up and voices would sound much more clear than on this. DINC was the best phone I ever used in recent years for earpiece/speakerphone audio for phone calls. This phone rots for that stuff. However, since I really don't make many voice calls these days, I've let this piece slide, even though it annoys the crap out of me.

The new OLED screens are so much better than the old ones and I love the contrast ratio vs the LCD on the ThunderBolt, etc. Camera's pretty amazing too. The gallery app loads SLOW AS ALL GET OUT though right after taking a new picture. This is kinda unacceptable. It also doesn't seem to unmount correctly from Macs when ejected from Finder. It will automatically remount unless I quickly unplug it or use Disk Utility to unmount the partition while leaving the "Disk" plugged in.

I gotta say the puzzle piece lock screen is pretty efficient too for getting to messages or call logs, after the initial confusion.

The plastic build feels like a kid's toy. Samsung really needs to stop using this crap plastic.

Lately I've been pushing a LOT of data through it and exercise the hardware under constant load all day, running tests downloading files via hotspot or running a torrent to do network performance tests over LTE, while streaming 256kbps audio. I've pushed about 9 GB of data through it this month and I'm only halfway through my billing cycle. I've not experienced any overheats or reboots like I have on some past handsets under similar load, it gets warm but not too ridiculously warm.

I have experienced one reboot, and one instance where Bluetooth wouldn't power on until I did a full power down/reboot. Both of these have been one-offs and I've not been able to repro. ThunderBolt tended to freeze/crash/reboot a handful of times, and their Sense-tweaked UI touches everywhere are hard to avoid and sometimes annoying.

So sum total tl;dr: Some pet peeves, but of the three available LTE handsets right now, I feel it is the best, has the best battery life, and overall as a handset in general, it is COMPLETELY usable, functional, and pretty darn zippy for most stuff. As a Verizon handset, the only other one I'd choose to use right now would be the veriPhone 4, but I've become a bit too addicted to LTE and a large phone/screen to switch back to EVDO slowness and tiny iPhone. As a handset on any carrier....even with Verizon's 4G glitches, their network still works overall better than the competition in my area, and the only other handset that really stuck out at me for a daily driver was Nexus S but it has it's own problems.