Droid at the Metallica concert

Took my Droid with me to the Metallica concert on Tuesday to see how it worked inside the HSBC arena (my signal is not always good there) and to see how it did with videos and pictures in that environment.

Overall I was happy with the experience but I found out the hard way that the position of the camera on the phone is not exactly optimal to me. I have more than 1 pic and video with my finger blocking the top of the picture as I was trying to hold the camera above my head to see over everyone.

Reception: Ok but not much better that my old phone.

Videos: Came out nice (especially when the house lights were on). Overall I was very please with this feature even the sound is decent for 18,000 screaming fans and a heavy metal band. I will always use the videos to remember the first time I got to hear Metallica play *One*, *Enter Sandman*, *Seek & Destroy*, and *Nothing Else Matters* in person. On a slightly down note the videos do seem a bit shaky but I was not in the environment to judge this at all.

Note: The droid seems to have a 10 min max video length. This may be a configurable option but I have not been able to find it yet and feel 10 min is enough time for me so I have not intentions of looking any further at this time. Just note that after 9 or 9.5 min the video timer turns red and starts to count down (rather than up) and the camera appears to stop recording at 10 min.


Pictures:
The non-zoomed pictures were nice (as seen in pic #1 below) but the biggest disappointment for me was the quality of the zoomed pictures (seen in pic #2 below). I took a bunch of pictures with the camera zoomed in (not sure why as I was 5 rows of standing people from the stage) and those pictures are a bit dull and grainy.

One thing I did like was the double tap zoom. Simply double tapping the touch screen will zoom the camera.

Battery Life:
Acceptable. I took about 70-75 pics, 30-40 min of video, and was checking email, text messages & sports scores between bands and the battery lasted through the night. I even made a call outside the arena after the concert. I don't want to pretend the battery life was great but it took the phone from about 80%-90% charge down to 40% or less (that was 30-40 min of video with the display on).

No Zoom:



Zoom: