This is my first venture into a touch-screen unit. I'm a Blackberry boy so I was pretty comfortable with the tactile keyboard. The touch screen one took quite some time to get accustomed to, although orienting the phone horizontally gives you larger keys to work with. The Swipe feature is useless-- at least to me, and requires more thinking than needs to be done when trying to write a message. Web browsing is excellent and pretty swift and with the HUGE screen there is almost no need to own a desktop or invest in a tablet device. Navigating the different screens is easy and can be mastered in a few minutes. Speech-to-text is an awesome feature and beats typing any day. Just be sure to use perfect diction to avoid wasting time correcting what it thinks you said. hahaha. The free Android applications you can get to customize your phone are endless in addition to the ones you may want to pay for. The phone does suffer from low-output speakers compared to the Blackberry so you may have to strain a bit when using the speakerphone function or when listening to music through the speakers. As for its basic function, it makes phone calls pretty well and rarely drops a call. Signal strength is decent in most environments, but if you get too far off the beaten path just be aware that your phone will be nearly a paperweight as the myriad of other functions require it to work, i.e. web browsing, gps, etc. Camera quality is excellent (although there is no forward-facing unit), but battery life is horrendous. So be sure to invest in these add-ons. A car charger, secondary wall charger, spare battery, external speakers (if you want to use it as a music player), memory card (you will use the included one up quickly), screen protectors, and by all means a case! I see too many people walking around with cracked screens. And because of this phone's size it is somewhat cumbersome to try to stash it in your shirt or pants pocket. Bear in mind that this device is essentially a full-on computer. It will run hot on you at times and sometimes it will lock up and you'll have to do the classic battery-pull to restart everything-- however it is the fastest restart I've seen for a smartphone. I would also highly recommend the car dock. Although pricey, it is beautiful and you can stow the phone to your windshield and see who's calling you at a glance. Plus if you use the gps function a lot it is wondrous to not have second device in your window as well. For you iPhone loathers, this is about as good as it gets to meeting and beating the competition and with the exception of their newer units, the Milestone X still has features that iPhone does not. It has a few more features that I failed to mention, but I believe I have covered the main items that are important to most people. Overall this is an excellent unit and it has served me well thus far. I am confident that you will be pleasantly surprised. Good luck!