The Inimitable Have Tex Blog

Verizon/Google did fix a few things with the December 11th update. First, whe I turned on the phone early last Friday, it just ran the update. Didn’t take long, rebooted and there it was. Here are some of the highlights from an end-user viewpoint:

• Bigger time display
• Clearer action buttons for answering/rejecting calls. It would still be better if you could just push them rather than having to swipe them, but an improvement nonetheless.
• Visual VM now has a speaker button – still doesn’t recognize a bluetooth headset, but a step in the right direction.
• Easier to pick a contact and navigate to it. Fewer clicks and it seems to be more lenient about how precisely you press the location on the map to activate navigation. Still don’t understand why it won’t just go there right from the contact.

The voice dial thing still isn’t fixed, but the voice search seems to be finding the contacts better. Email still comes in at random unless you power cycle the phone.

Verizon, when’s the next update, and what will it fix?

Just over a month ago, the Motorola Droid arrived with much fanfare from Verizon. Billed as an iPhone killer, it was overdone. I decided to be an early adopter, and, overall, I’m not disappointed.

What’s good:

• The Droid has a great touch screen, large, crisp graphics and responsive to touch.
• It has a physical keyboard when used in landscape mode, more on that later.
• It’s a good phone, decent reception, bluetooth works OK, speaker is decent.
• There are plenty of apps. The app store doesn’t compete with the iPhone, but there’s a good selection and it’s getting better
• It has wifi, and it’s easy to set up.
• Gmail integration is good.
• Great browser, great search, with decent voice search- try “nearest Panera” – great stuff.
• Built-in Navigation, with auto resume after a call

What’s not:

• No voice dial – Oh there’s an app, but in a couple of dozen tries it never once picked the right contact.
• Screen shuts off during calls, and requires you touch awkwardly placed power button to get back on, then open the lock again – stupid and annoying.
• No contact sync, except via GMail, Exchange, or Google Apps Premier. So if you have your own domain, and don’t want to spring for Exchange, you are out of luck. I know Google wants to push Premier Apps and its Exchange capability, but really, this is stone age or really exploitative, depending on your viewpoint. (Oh, I forgot, you can stick your contacts on an SD card too and import them – sneakernet anyone?)
• How the Navigation works – You pick a contact, select the icon to map it, and it brings up a map, then you click  the highlighted point on the map, then tell it to go there. How about a voice command of  “drive”, then “Alex Burns home”?- that would be nice? I think Tiger Woods got a Droid and was trying to set a destination when he hit the fire hydrant! To add insult to injury, the cloverleaf near my house went in 3 years ago, but it’s still not on Google Maps.
• Visual voice mail doesn’t integrate with bluetooth – and there’s no button to activate the speakerphone in the App – Wake up Google!
• Email sync doesn’t work, I sometimes wait hours to get emails on my phone – even my Treo 600 got that right five plus years ago.
• The slide out keyboard sucks, and the on-screen keyboard doesn’t come close to the one on the iPhone. You can use them, but you’ll be pulling out your netbook a lot more to send email if you have a Droid.

It may sound as if I hate the Droid, I don’t, but I sure hope Google/Verizon’s December 11th system update fixes a lot of the above. It seems as if the Droid/Android 2.0 operating system were rushed to market. It reminds me not of Windows Vista, but early XP. A good operating system rushed out because Millenium was awful. In Droid’s case, rushed out so as not to let AT&T/Apple have another holiday season without a competitor from Verizon.

Ultimately, Google and Verizon will fix this, it’s just too important to both of them. How can Google sell phones with Navigation if the maps are out of date? Who will tolerate non-functional voice dial when hands-free is the law in most states? I just wish they’d waited another couple of months and got more of the kinks worked out. As for Motorola, nice try, it’s a good piece of hardware overall, but we need to be able to wake the screen up at the end of the call with a finger swipe – period. And fix that keyboard in V2.0, or drop it and improve the on-screen version.

Tips from the trenches:

• What to do about email – if you power the phone off and on again it will then sync your email. Nuts, yes, effective also.
• Contacts, CompanionLink has a product that syncs from Outlook to Gmail, and let’s Google’s own sync complete the loop with the phone. Works well – $40, only drawback is you have to start the sync manually from the PC each time – no push or scheduled sync. Also first sync can take hours if you have a few thousand contacts.
• Favorites – stick a shortcut on one of your homescreens for each person you call regularly – closest thing to speed dial and a stopgap until voice dial works. Google, we need more homescreens and a menu item to pick them with.
• Simple Weather – tried them all, Android weather doesn’t refresh, this one works well
• Swift, great Twitter app
• Flashlight, when you’re fumbling for car key, or trying to find a screw you’ve dropped inside a computer case!
• Advanced Task Killer free version – when the phone starts slowing down, great way to get it moving again
• Silent mode on/off – Curvefish, also WiFi on/off from same vendor – great widgets to control things you need to do often.
• Google Sky – really cool app.