This post comes in the middle of a series I’m working on, and I agonized over writing it for over a day. But after much deliberation I finally decided to write up my experience on my new Motorola Droid phone on the Verizon network. I’ll get back to the series next week.
Business Time
No, not that Business Time. The original Business Time. You see, time is a precious commodity for me: I run three different businesses, co-raise three young kids at home, train for Ironman triathlons and commit to my local church. In order for my professional endeavors to succeed, while staying connected to friends, family and hobbies, my working time and energy need to be as focused and productive (see this post for how I do this) as can be. I don’t have a staff or IT department to rely on when the technology gets dodgy, so my stuff needs to work with as little troubleshooting from me as possible.
Processing Speed
Earlier this year I upgraded from a Treo650 to the Blackberry Curve. From a productivity standpoint, the Curve traded the Treo’s touchscreen for a trackball, performed wireless sync for most of my data, offered faster browsing and better app integration. In fact, one of the things I liked about the Blackberry right out of the box was that it just worked the way it was supposed to. For example, I could be streaming music via Pandora and if a call came in it would switch to the phone. When the phone call ended it would switch back to Pandora. I didn’t need to spend hours troubleshooting why this app made that one crash, or how to custom configure the settings to get stuff done. The internet browsing was good – not iPhone good – but still did the trick for me, and was a vast improvement over the Treo. The most productive aspect of the Blackberry was the keyboard. It allowed me to process through the 100′s of emails, texts and tweets that I receive in the course of a day with great efficiency. I could care less about a phone’s processing speed, but my processing speed went up dramatically. With all the information that I process daily, this made a very real positive impact.
Robot Phone
I wasn’t really looking to replace the Curve. I was looking for a video camera, like the Flip from Sony. Then I watched this review, and realized that I could have a new, super-cool phone AND a video camera for less than the camera alone. That made sense to me. So I bought it.
I’ve now had 4 days to play with and evaluate the phone. Here are my initial takeaways:
Droid Video
The video camera is great. Sound quality and image stabilization are both more than adequate for my needs (which will primarily be video blogging). Thinking about getting a Flip camera? This phone might just do the trick.
Droid Navigation
It has built in navigation. If you were thinking about getting a dash-mounted navigation system like the Garmin or TomTom, you might want to consider this phone instead. Spoken voice directions, a real-time orthagonal map (3D view of a 2D map), and rerouting options make this a decent choice.
Droid WiFi
WiFi is enabled out of the box. One of my biggest gripes with Verizon was that they didn’t enable the Curve’s native WiFi capability. That always bothered me. With my Droid, I can log onto wireless at home, at the office, or at the local coffee shop. The WiFi seems faster than the 3G most of the time, and runs Google Voice with more clarity and fewer drops.
Android 2.0 and Google Apps
It runs Google apps like a champ. I’m a heavy Google user, including Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Google Voice, YouTube, Docs, etc. The phone is built on Google’s Android OS, and it just flat works. The biggest benefit this has over the Curve is that my Gmail account is 100% synchronized on this phone, whereas it was not on the Blackberry. I had some pretty decent hacks in place on the Curve for email handling, but this phone obviates the need for any hacks.
Open Source
I have long been a fan of the open source approach to building a technology ecosystem. As of this writing, the Andorid Market has somewhere around 10,000 apps available, and I’ve found several replacements for apps that I’d become dependent on with the Curve, such as YouMail, Facebook, Pandora, YouVersion Bible, and Twitdroid (replaced Ubertwitter). There are still a few things I’m waiting for (like a SugarCRM mobile app, a decent on-board video editor, SocialScope, Tweetdeck, and an Evernote app…) but I’m very pleased with the selection thus far.
Droid Keyboard
The Droid features a touchscreen virtual keyboard (profile or landscape) and slide out Qwerty keyboard, but I’m still not as fast or accurate as I was with the Blackberry Curve. The slide out keyboard has received some criticism for lacking definition between keys, and the layout of special characters is taking me a little while to get used to. But I think that with time and practice I can get back up to speed. And the productivity savings in other areas (most notably Gmail and internet browsing) more than compensate for my early learning curve.
Droid Does
I’m still learning this device, but overall I’m very impressed with it. If you are reading and have specific questions, feel free to ask and I’ll answer either here or in a future post.
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