Droid Does!

It has been almost a month now I have been putting my new Motorola Droid phone though the paces. My Verizon contract was up and for the past year I was planning on dumping them for AT&T so I could finally have the iPhone. This decision was not easy, and it weighed heavily on me. Yeah, your thinking it's just a phone, but my phone stays on my hip from the time I get out of the shower until I hit the sheets and serves many duties. Besides making calls, my relaible Blackberry pearl delivered my email, posted tweets, sent twit-pics, located places of interest with google maps, and accessed facebook mobile. Although it didn't have GPS, the location feature via cell service was good enough to keep me from getting lost in Yakima. I won't miss the little screen or the buggy delay of the pearl track ball, but I will miss the way it was quick to answer the phone and easy to charge. More on that in a moment.

The Droid is expensive compared to most phones in Verizon's arsenal, with a 2 year contract it sets you back $199, however I have a $100 rebate in route so if you net it out it's comparable to most smart phones. Where it begins to pay for itself is in the services it provides. The Droid comes with Google navigation, actual voice turn-by-turn directions, and unlike most car nav's it is powered by real time Google data. This replaces your VZ navigation charge if you subscribe and could save you the cost of the phone in one years time. The Android market is full of other useful apps as well, and since the phone has a large touchscreen, media player, and removable upgradable Micro SD storage chip it hold twice as much media as my 8GB iPod touch. Upgradable to 32GB you will have plenty of room for pictures, video, and music. So far it replaced my Car GPS & My iPod.

As for the Droid as a phone, it has great call quality, seems to have better reception than my Pearl, and a much louder and more clear speaker phone. As for comfort it is awkward to hold up to my ear and much heavier than many phones. Using blootooth is the best way to comfortably make calls, yet one nuance is the way you answer. W/O a headset you slide the answer prompt and it has more than once failed to function with ease. It is frustrating at times even to unlock or wake the Droid. I hope to find an app that improves the wake-up unlock gestures. The blackberry I just pressed a button, the droid takes some effort and is more likely to cause a call fumble.

Another minor flaw is the slider keyboard. A real keyboard should have been the major advantage over the iPhone but the flat keys are hard to handle. With no feel to the keys fat fingering is frustrating and frequent. While I still slide it out for most major typing every time I make a mistake I curse the designer. Motorola should have had a blind person design the keyboard but i will move on.

A major disappointment with the Droid is the the camera. It has a 5MP camera that shoots good quality video too, but don't throw away your digital camera just yet. The camera, like most camera phones, does poorly in low light, so it has an obnoxious LED flash that blinds your subjects and then casts a harsh glow on everything in the shot. The camera is also painfully slow, poor to focus, and crashes on many of the apps that use it. Don't think the Droid camera is going to be something to rely on, unless a software upgrade fixes it's slow response time, I will only be using it for the augmented reality apps I have installed.

What is "Augmented Reality"? Glad you asked. With a GPS location, and 3G connection to the information super highway, the Droid can become a window to real-time location aware information right before your eyes. Think of it like terminator vision, or a heads up display like a fighter jet pilot.. oh, yeah, and there is an app for that too.

Google Goggles allows you to photograph objects and text and it does an instant optical charicter scan and then shows you google search results of your photo. Take a picture of famous art, a logo or sign, and it uses your location and the object to feed relevant information to you from the web. The AR feature shows push pins of google maps data within your proximity. For example, the restaurant or store location and contact information will appear if you click the little push-pin icons withing the camera view as you pan around. This is difficult to describe so check it out on YouTube.

Layar is another AR app that allows you to choose layers of data to overlay your reality view through the camera or see it on a map view of your location. Many pre made layers exist from golf courses to the Wikipedia. Great for tourists! I recently tried Layar in Portland, it was keen to find places to eat nearby, but I ended up using Google Maps to actually give me walking directions to the nearest Pizza Schmizza store.

Google Sky is another app similar to an augmented reality app but it uses the phones orientation and your location to show you the constellations based on the place and time of day,the angle you hold the phone and the compass within the Droid. Pretty cool for star gazers!

A few other camera apps that have been fun but not yet all that useful are a bar-code scanner and a streaming video app that crashes my droid when I try to use it. Hopefully the bugs get worked out on a software update so I can stream some video to this blog. I bet you can't wait! One use the bar-code scanner impressed me with was loading new apps. Some websites include digital image codes on the page that you can snap with the bar-code reader and it takes your phone to the app download page to install it. No need to input any URL or search for the app in the app market, it just finds it in a 'snap'

I mentioned Driod replaces my iPod touch but one app that has made my iTunes obsolete is Pandora. Pandora is a streaming audio app that play music based on your preferences. Make a radio station based on an artist you enjoy and it picks similar music, commercial free, and streams it in amazing quality to your phone. I just plug my headphone jack into my car radio for my commute home. No more dangerously changing tracks, or looking for albums on my iPod, I just let Pandora pick and if they pick poorly I tap "Thumbs Down" and they pick a new track. Since pandora seems to have every song at my fingertips, I don't see the need to fill up that 16gb SD chip with Mp3's. More room for apps!

The web browser on the Droid is far superior to my Blackberry but not quite as friendly as my iPod touch was. The lack of true multi-touch in the browser is odd. Multi-touch works on the droid, but I have only noticed it function with Google Maps. Pinch works to zoom in and out of maps but not on images or pages in the media app or browser. Using the zoom controls makes tapping the wrong spot and accidentally hitting a link frustrating and frequent. This is overcome by google's voice search feature. Simply touch the voice search microphone and it listens to your request and searches google for your answer. Most of the time this is reliable, but short sweet statements are difficult for me. I typically ramble and blabber a query and I get nothing. I need to practice being short and to the point. Let me continue...

Since I used to Geocache frequently I am hoping the Droid may become a paperless caching solution that can also replace my hand held hiking GPS, but there are a couple problems with that. First, my GPS was waterproof, and 2nd, some remote geocaching locations may not have good 3G coverage. Provided I pre-plan my rural trips and keep my GPS handy for rainy days, the Droid may make spontaneous urban caching a pleasure. I downloaded Geobeagle and it works but is not very refined. A geocaching app from Groundspeak is in the works. I'll keep you posted.

The Droid definitely replaced my car navigation GPS, and my iPod touch for most uses, I can't stop at that alone. The multiple apps I have tried make the Droid far superior to my blackberry so by getting 3 gadgets in one make it a real value. I won't proclaim it to be a iPhone killer as some try to do, but for those of you who realize the superior 3G service Verizon provides, love everything Google, and love to be on the cutting edge of technology I highly recommend the Droid. If you can wait, you may want to hold out for the Nexus One. It is faster and and does almost everything the Droid does. Just to recap, below is a list of what my Droid Does. If you read this please give me your feedback, comment here, Buzz, Tweet, Facebook, or email me.

Email, Tweet, Google Talk, Twitpic, Listen to Mp3's, Watch YouTube, Navigate, Local Search, Surf the Web, Geocache, Geotag, Facebook, Text, Blog, Get a weather report (With Video!) Calendar & Contact Sync, Price Search with Bar-Code Scanner, oh, and I make phone calls sometimes too.

Ben