General Opinions

Do not get this phone. This is by far one of the crappiest phones on Verizon. I'd rather have a flip phone instead of this phone. Nothing and i mean NOTHING on this phone works correctly and neither Verizon or Samsung want to take responsibility for it.

 

Ignore this person. There are plenty of people who have this phone and have no problems with it. I've used it with stock FroYo, stock Gingerbread, and multiple ROMs from both FroYo and Gingerbread. At no point in time have I had any problems with the device.

It will be a nice step up from a BB Curve. The one thing that he'll probably notice almost immediately, though, is the decreased battery life. The Curve really sips battery, while the Charge can tend to use a lot of it. If he'll be in an area of spotty 4G, it can often times be worthwhile to set the phone to 3G to avoid the battery loss from the phone constantly trying to re-obtain 4G signal.

Outside of the battery, it will be a very nice upgrade.

 

There are extended batteries available that add a ton of battery life. I use bluetooth all day every day at work (podcasts and music), but I also have a desk charger connected almost the entire time also. So I can't really say how much an inactive bluetooth connection (outside of phone calls, etc) drains the battery.

Mentioning bluetooth, though, does remind me of one known issue with the phone. If you're not using bluetooth, a lot of the phones have a tendancy to chirp or squeal. I haven't experienced this, but I've only had a handful of calls that didn't use bluetooth in the past year. Even those who have experienced the issue have stated that they don't have the issue when using a bluetooth headset or bluetooth car connection.

 

http://androidforums.com/samsung-droid-charge/467604-ics-droid-charge.html

No ICS for DROID Charge

 

It's definitely not hopeful. Samsung is saying that the /system partition isn't big enough for ICS and all of the bloat they want to include, so I don't believe they're planning a release. The community devs have been having issues because Samsung hasn't released the RIL (radio interface layer) code, which allows the kernel, radios, and OS to communicate with each other (as I understand, at least).

Because of this, the only ICS ROM floating around right now is wifi only (or possibly unreliable 3G at this point) and that doesn't appear to have had any work done on it for the last 3 months. In any case, it's definitely not suitable for a daily driver.

 

I don't really have any. While it would depend on how far his company will let him alter the phone (most won't let you change ROMs), Eclipse and Tweaked are the top two ROMs curently. Other than that, almost everyone has stated that FP1 (the most recent OS build), even stock, is much faster than previous builds, so being forced to stay stock shouldn't be a painful experience anyway.

 

Juice Defender...unbelievable increase in battery life.