So i'll start off by saying I work at a local verizon authorized retailer and we just got our shipment for droid 2's today. Me being the techie person I am decided to check it out see what I think of it.I will be comparing it to the moto droid mostly because it is the direct succesor.
First thing you notice about the phone is the look, it has a dark chrome bezel around it, which gives the phone a nice elegant look to it.(personally not a fan) Next you realize Moto decided to change the color of the phone from black to a dark navy blue. As i started to handle the phone I noticed it was made of a different material than that of the droid 2 and feels more plastic. The buttons used are also plastic (power, volume rockers, camera key)
The capacitive buttons on the phone are laid out differently using the order menu,home,back,search. When you start to use the phone, it has the same interface as the Moto Droid X. It also comes with Flash 10.1 pre installed onto the phone as well as swype. The phone is noticeably faster than a stock droid, and when stacked up against my droid at 1.25ghz its just as fast after boot, and when you start running more apps the 512mb of ram really helps. the phone comes with 8gb built in memory, 8gb memory card preinstalled, and can support up to 32gb SDcard allowing for 40GB of total storage.
The biggest feature of the phone is the keyboard. its much more spaced out and no more pad to the right of the phone. My droid has one of the bubble keyboards and I loved that, the new keyboard on the droid2 is leagues above that and makes me almost want to trade in my droid for it.
It comes preinstalled with DLNA support, kindle, NFS shift, Quickoffice,skype, blockbuster, and 3g mobile hotspot. The only ones that are removable through manage applications is Flash 10.1 and NFS shift. It still has the my accounts "feature" from the droid X thats apart of ninja blur, while it does make keeping your accounts neat, it can be annoying when it comes to actually accesing the information. It comes stock with 7 home screens, and scalable widgets.
The internet on this phone is really fast, over Wifi it destroys my droid on the same wifi network, not sure if this is due to more ram or what but it was impressing how fast it was.
This was my first review of a phone so sorry if I missed anything. if you have any questions about the phone jsut post here I will do my best to get around to answering them
EDIT: the camera is the same 5mp camera, DVD quality video recording, nothing special there. BUT it does support tap to foucs so you can adjust where the focus point is, something I wish my droid 1 had
Edit 2: the battery is the same in the droid 2 as the moto Droid model BP6x
Edit 3: the home dock works the car dock does not. Uses same battery and charging port so those are fine, cases also do not fit properly, all of this is due to the lip at the bottom of the phone.