The Inimitable Have Tex Blog

In November 2009 Android phones got a shot in the arm from Verizon, the best US provider, and I got my Droid. Now Android is everywhere, and all major US carriers each have several Android phones.

No single phone dethroned the iPhone as the smartphone of choice, or the Blackerry as the corporate go to phone, but the Android army has taken the mobile world by storm.

My smartphone journey was from Palm Treos, via a Blackberry Curve after I just couldn’t stand Palm’s crashes and lack of any real improvements, to the first generation Droid. We are an Android family, my wife has a Droid Eris, not the most capable of all phones, but fine for her needs, and my son has an LG Ally, great value and he’s thrilled with it.

Motorola did a great job with the first Droid, would I like to upgrade, sure, but it still works well, thanks to frequent upgrades and great free/low-cost apps.

Speaking of Apps, now over 100K, found a few more good ones:

• Launcher Pro, on the whole I like Froyo (Android 2.2), but it bogs down sometimes, not with Launcher Pro replacing the standard launcher. The only downside is that it doesn’t bring your home screens over, so you have to rebuild them.
• PdaNet, discovered this on an AmTrak train. Turns out free wifi is only on Acela trains, so I needed to tether my phone to my laptop. Verizon wanted $20 a month, PdaNet does it for free. Great app, allowed me to support customers while riding the rails to Newark.
• Big Killer, great task killer, more thorough than Advanced Task Killer. Gets back memory from apps you aren’t using, speeds phone up.
• Nook reader. Love the page turning feature and the font control. Nook Color is now on my Christmas list. Kindle app OK, but lame.
• Google Maps/Navigation. Still great app, use it daily and don’t need a separate GPS.
• Useful switches, replaces Settings, but quicker to use.

A lot of companies are spending a small fortune to get unified communications, which, put simply, is where both voice and email end up in your email inbox. In addition to acting as a Skype competitor for making calls, Google Voice can replace your voicemail with a combination of text message alerts to your mobile phone, and MP3 attachments on emails.

The text message alerts attempt to turn the spoken word into text through voice recognition. The success of this varies wildly based on the speaker, often with hilarious results. The same text also appears in the email you receive, along with a link to download an MP3 file. The MP3 is a recording of the incoming call that would otherwise have gone to voice mail. Any media player with play them back (Windows Media Player, iTunes for example).

You can set up Google Voice on multiple lines, so that all your voice mail hits your inbox. That way you only have one place to look for your voice mail, and you can keep it for as long as you like.

It also solved another problem for me, the lousy, extra fee Visual Voice Mail app from Verizon on my Android phone. The dumb thing wouldn’t recognize bluetooth. It also required you to switch to speakerphone for each message, if you wanted that option.

Google Voice is a huge improvement, and the text sometimes informs, often entertains, and like all Google products, will probably improve over time.

9 months is a significant time period. All of us have spent that amount of time waiting to be born. Students spend about that much time each year in the course of their studies. I’ve now spent that amount of time with my Verizon Droid phone. A lot has happened in that time period.

The  Droid has gone through 2 system updates, Apple has continued to experience success with its iPhone, although the most recent iteration has given the company and its customers some heartburn. The Android market has matured considerably in two primary ways:

1. Lots more apps
2. Better quality apps, by and large.

The main improvements have been speed and stability, plus a lot more choice. At Verizon alone there are 4-5 Android phones to choose from. The navigation and voice search are the two biggest improvement in the platform. Voice search is increasingly accurate, and navigation has lost several clicks, making it much safer to use while driving. Surprisingly, the quality of the speakerphone and music playback quality through the built-in speaker seem to have improved.

There are a couple of Apps I just can’t speak highly enough of  Wi-Fi Analyzer and Voice Search. Wi-Fi Analyzer allows you to use the Droid to figure out where you are going to get the best reception from your wireless network, whether there’s interference on the channel you are using, and where any dead spots may be. Great for getting the most out of your wireless network, and knowing where a range extender might come in useful. Voice Search is just phenomenal in version 2.2 of the Android operating system. The recognition has improved tremendously, so that voice dialing becomes a real possibility, but it works just as well for browsing the web too, and can be used to enter an address into the navigation system. It’s a life saver while driving, perhaps literally. You can set the navigation or dial a call while keeping your eyes on the road where they belong. You can even pick out your favorite tune to play, if you store your music on your Droid.

My Droid has passed from the shiny new toy stage into the workaday tool category, and it’s holding up pretty well. I found a couple of new tools that have made it considerably easier to live with:

• K9 mail, odd name, great replacement for the standard Android mail client. You can get more items on the page, better control over each mail item, and it’s a lot easier to clean out trash with the batch ops feature. Free from the marketplace.
• Dolphin Browser. While the standard Android browser is pretty good, Dolphin has two features that are addictive: it offers a tabbed interface, something I’ve loved since Firefox was first launched; it allows the pinch and spread zooming capabilities first seen on the iPod and iPhone 0 much easier (and cooler) than the +/- of the standard browser. It also offers custom gestures for opening new tabs, going back and forward, very helpful and a little like using Graffiti, for the old Treo/Palm users among you.

Not much more to report at this time, except that I no longer have iPhone envy. If Verizon introduced the iPhone tomorrow, I would pass, not enough advantage to consider switching.

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.