My week with (as) a Droid.

I’m quite certain many of my friends have been secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) chastising me for having dumb phones for last few years. As big of a technophile as I am, I suppose its been incongruous… but in my defense, most of my friends and family are on Verizon so I’ve been trying to stay with them (and their super shitty phones) so I don’t have to buy a lot of minutes. Last week, Verizon finally arrived in this decade… just in time for the next… with the new Motorola Droid. [Super annoying flash page here.]

There is already a huge number of reviews out there, some of them very badly researched, so instead of giving a full on review, I’ll try to give my experiences and try not to write a book.

I think the shortest description of the phone that I can give: The Droid is easily more capable than the iPhone, but the iPhone UI is far better integrated. Once I got passed the giddy “OMG NEW PHONE!” moments, which lasted quite a while, it became apparent that the damn thing just isn’t (super) easy to use. Like any linux system, it feels like everything was just built on top of something else. Perhaps my biggest gripe in this area is that I have to start an application to configure the phone… it isn’t a real feature of the OS. Modularity arguments aside, that is just annoying. When comparing the Droid to my co-worker’s/friends’ iPhone over the last week, I was really a little envious of the seamless integration of everything… however, I have no enmity or regret… the phone’s capabilities more than make up for a pretty UI (to me that is).

The phone itself is a bit of a brick. It has weight and is nice to hold, but it’s not nice to carry around in your pocket. Since hip holsters went out out of style like 5 years ago, I’m relegated to having a giant bulging pocket… and somehow the millions of iPhone users haven’t worn out the terrible joke: “Is that your phone or are you just happy to see me?” (really… wasn’t that like 1995?) The case of the phone is some sort of metal alloy, which isn’t important unless you’re one of those people that believes plastic == cheap and therefore not worthy. I happen to think it instills a bit of confidence in the construction and longevity but it doesn’t increase the utility I get from the phone. The screen is a gorgeous 720p (720×480) LCD (would have liked amOLED better) with a stupidly durable glass capacitive touch plate. The power/sleep button is the same as the iPhone’s, but the volume toggle and dedicated camera button feel very loose (I bought a silicon cover so I don’t really worry about it now).

I was shocked when I first heard the call quality. The ear piece has a true base sound to it so voices sound real. The speaker phone is pretty awesome too. While the speaker isn’t audiophile quality, it’s loud, clear and crackle free. The mic also gets a boost (and possibly intelligent filtering) in speaker mode so the person you’re talking to gets a pretty clear quality on the other end. Since the entire platform is well integrated, you can also hit the hotkey for voice search (which would normally just search google) and say something like “Call Adam Schultz mobile” and it will! Despite reports of the accuracy of this tool, I rarely have to fight it.

Now that I’ve settled into the phone, I am starting to find some things that annoy me, and the really bad part is that they annoy me in the same way Windows Mobile annoys me. Using the phone requires a remarkable amount of maintenance, at least for a power user like myself (I’ve easily downloaded 300 unique apps in the last week including many system augments). Like WM, there is no apparent way to just close an application, unlike WM there is no direct way to close an application. The theory behind this is that if you started the app you (obviously?) intended to keep using it, so they just let it run in the background. Now, since this is a linux based phone, the kernel does kill applications when there isn’t enough memory to run the next app you want to start, however, the kernel doesn’t take overall performance into account so its very easy to get to a point where things start to stutter and you have to go find (yet another) app to force close things. At this point, you realize that apps have the ability to register themselves as start-up programs (since things are running that have no earthly business doing so) AND they can register themselves as services so the base operating system will keep restarting them even if you don’t want them. So now you’re thinking just get rid of the annoying ones since they probably aren’t worth the trouble? Well… Google saw fit to install several applications like this on their own and prevent you from being able to nuke them (that is until the phone is rooted). I think having just the Google services would be ok if android developers would learn how to clean up their own messes. The APIs allow for you to create an exit function that kills your program on its own, but it seems extremely few people use it… worse, it seems a lot of developers don’t even implement the suspend functionality so its possible to have a program eating CPU in the background without your knowledge.

Beyond the WM likeness, there is one other thing that really annoys me… without the android market, the platform doesn’t do much. For example, the Droid only comes with 2 bluetooth profiles: an extremely minimal audio gateway and OBEX object push (but not receive!). Fortunately, the market has free apps that will give you things like bluetooth DUN and OBEX object exchange/FTP… but I’m not convinced it should be left up to the community to provide seemingly basic (at least compared to dumb phones, much less the iPhone) functionality.

Quick list of apps replacing/adding functionality to android:

• Advanced Task Killer
• Astro File Manager (Browse the entire file system and services, backup installed apps)
• Bluetooth File Transfer (OBEX File Exchange/FTP)
• PDANet (bluetooth DUN)
• AndroZip (file compression support)
• Handcent SMS (the pre-installed app doesn’t do simple things like group messages or message splitting)
• Not Call Log Prefs (for some reason, ending a call takes you immediately to the call log, this fixes that)
• Autostarts (not free – and not quite useful yet since there is no root access as of yet)

I realize a lot of the above seems a little inconsistent with my great like of the Droid and claim that it is easily more capable than the iPhone… so, how about some good news? First, there isn’t anything the iPhone (3GS) can do that android can’t and the UI (when properly managed) is extremely responsive. The ability to browse the internet, click on an email address, start an email and go back to my browser without losing my place anywhere is pretty nice. Comparatively, the ability to answer an email while playing a game without losing my place is amazing. The entire phone is interconnected at the OS level (similar to the way windows handles URIs) so it takes little to no effort to transition data from one app to another in a useful manner and the OS lets you set default applications for different handlers. The fact that you can change apps for actions means that you can even replace the home screen entirely if you want (PandaHome is a great, free home replacement if anyone is looking). The copy and paste integration could be better, but from what I’ve seen that is entirely an app level thing that developers need to improve on.

One of the features that has been poo-pooed a lot by reviewers is the camera. At first I agreed. The auto focus seemed to never work and the pictures were blurry and grainy. However, a couple of days ago, it was magically fixed and now it has great quality. I’ve found a couple of apps that make some interesting usage out of the camera too. BarcodReader will scan any standard barcode and let you search Google for it. It will also decode QR Codes which is pretty fantastic. I’ve found it useful enough to go out and find a QR Code generator so I can very quickly transfer links and text to my phone. I also found a java script that I can include as a bookmark in firefox that will convert any page that I’m viewing into a QR Code. Of course, not to have my phone outdone, I found an app that will let me do the same on my Droid so I can share links and info easily with other phones. The other app I found is ShopSavvy, which is another barcode reader that hooks up to a very fast, complete and accurate product database that will let you instantly compare product data and prices (even based on your current locale).

Some other fun apps:

• Google Sky Map (not the most useful, but simply amazing if you’re outside looking at the stars)
• Google Voice
• Dolphin Browser (not as stable as the default, but gives you tabbed browsing and gestures with rumors to support multi-touch on eclair soon)
• GPS Status (nifty app that will give you all the info on the accelerometer, magnetometer – with compass, and GPS)
• androidVNC
• ConnectBot (ssh with tunneling!)

As far as the UI is concerned, there is only one thing I like about it better than the iPhone. With android, you can add widgets to the desktop which gives you the ability to have immediate access to data and tools. Currently, I have Beautiful Widgets, a battery monitor, a sound widget that lets me toggle between sound/vibrate/silent, and a built in power manager that lets me one click enable/disable WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and data sync.

I think that is about all I have to say for now. Let me know in the comments if you want to know more.

P.S.: Multi-touch is not “suspiciously” absent from my post. The Droid and OS are fully capable, just no useful apps use it yet. Think of it like MMS for the iPhone… except it won’t take 2 years for it to be a reality 🙂