Motorola Droid

I did something a bit unusual for me and purchased an electronic product the day it hit the store (marriage does change people). I bought a Motorola Droid. Seems like everyone I know has been using an iPhone but AT&T was not getting my money as their network around my house and the cabin BWE and I go to leaves a LOT to be desired. So I waited and waited and waited and finally Verizon came out with something that is comparable to the iPhone (Yes I am very stubborn and I would have waited till 3Q of 2010 for Verizon's iPhone if I had to).

This blog might be a bit pre-mature as I have had the phone less than 24 but I wanted to write something I could point friends and family too as they ask me questions about the phone.

so What do I think?

Overall I like the phone it took me just a few minutes of discovering to get to the point where once again I was texting and making phone calls. A few minutes after that I was browsing the internet and had my first twitter app installed on the phone. So now I can tweet and see other tweets right on my phone (with my old LG ENV I tweeted using SMS and never was able to get it to see other tweets). Ten 10 minutes after that I had the blue tooth head set working, the phone was connecting to my home wireless router and automatically switching between that (when available) and Verizon

Then.... the Honey-Do list took over so I had to put my new toy away for a little while... so at this point I have not hooked it up to any of my E-mail accounts, installed other apps, or really gotten a chance to do much geek stuff with it but I will follow with a blog about that as soon as I get to it.

Like
1. This might sound simple but I *love* the screen locking this phone provides. All the phones I have had in the past seem to screw this feature up one way or another. My basic Philosophy is that if I leave the phone for a set period of time it should lock (automatically without any help or keyword from me). The phone should stay locked through any activity (including a restart) *EXCEPT* for answering an incoming call or making an emergency call. This phone does exactly that. My butt will no longer be dialing my friends on its own.

1a. The phone has pattern locking for a security feature so I can draw a pattern on the touch screen to unlock the phone instead of trying to enter a password (that I would mistype 20 times). The pattern locking is a simple connect the dots app on the touch screen so it is rather simple to use.

2. When the phone locks the touch screen turns off. Again a simple feature (one that other might not like) but I need to press the on\off switch to re-enable the touch screen thus turning the touch pad on\off will happen when I want it to not when my arm brushes up against the screen while I am walking.

3. Network switching between Verizon and pre-setup routers is automatic.

4. Threaded text messaging. If you are a heavy user of text messaging then I think you will love this feature as I do... This feature will make it *A LOT* easier to keep multiple texting conversations going at the same time... For me the real test for this will be tomorrow (Sunday) as I will get 100s of text emails regarding NFL and NHL stats while watching the games and texting 4 or 5 of my friends about how how our fantasy teams are doing and what we think of various plays or referee calls.

5. Speed.... So far the phones is fast... real fast to me... of course as I add more apps that might change

6 Memory... The phone comes standard with 16GB

7. Voice recognition searching... This is a cool feature... Simply talking to the phone to do a search of the phone for a contact or a Google search is cool so far.


Dislike
1. So far I am not real fond of the physical Keyboard (KB). The KB is flat with little distinction where one key stops and the next starts. I like to be able to feel the keys and that is making it difficult for me to get used to the phone. The touch screen keyboard is like any other touch screen keyboard and I make too many mistakes with that as well. Also adding to these bad vibes about the keyboard is how far it slides out from the phone. When the KB slides out the top of the keys for the top row of the KB is right up against the top section of the phone and I keep hitting the top section of the phone with the fingers as I type.

2. It requires a GMail account before you can do anything. In the store I could not even get my contacts transferred until I had a GMail account.. Of course I have one but never type or remember the password so I had to make a new one in the store to get my contacts transferred from my old phone and now I can't figure out how to switch it back to my old account... Editing the user name does not appear to be an option so I added the old one as a 2nd account, however, based on the message provided by the phone I am afraid if I just delete the new account it will delete all of my contacts transferred from the old phone... that would be a major *FAIL* so I am not even going to *test* that feature. I guess the moral of this story is be ready with your GMail account name & password when you go to the store to get this phone.

3. Outside of browsing I am having a bit of trouble figuring out how to have multiple apps running all at same time but i think this is more me than the phone and I need to do a little bit of RTFM on this one.


Well that is all for now... I will write more as I progress with the phone.