The Motorola Droid

Posted by Gabe on December 28, 2009 under Droid | 11 Comments to Read

Guess what I got for Christmas? Yep – the Droid. Like many things it prompted a blog post, so if you are thinking about getting one, I hope this helps you.

I must preface this “review” with a few caveats. I don’t pretend to be an expert on anything, or a professional reviewer, but from a user’s point of view I think I have a lot to offer, especially since I am a computer nerd and can handle technical things.  I also have noticed that part of my decision revolved around reading other reviews, and many of them were influenced by personal allegiances.  Many people who buy one or the other (iPhone or Droid) don’t want to admit they made a mistake. I will do my best to be as objective as possible, especially since I have till tomorrow to take it back without penalty. Update 01/02/10: Read this but keep in mind had I read the “Getting Started” pamphlet in full before I let myself loose on my phone I would have had fewer bumps along the way.  I highly suggest that if you have a new Droid that you be a tad more patient than I was. :)

Why I Chose Droid

When I first looked at the iPhone I LOVED it!  It is sleek, pretty and the interface is wonderful.  However, when I tried to use the keyboard that was an absolute show stopper for me. My fat fingers were constantly looking for the backspace key.  It has no other keyboard so that was it – no iPhone for me.  It also didn’t help that I was already with Verizon and would have to pay to get out of my contract.  But that is up in April and I am a patient person.  If the iPhone was right for me I would have waited.  I even went back a few months later to see if my fingers got any “slimmer”.  Nope – I was still having the same problems.  I had also heard from many iPhone users how bad AT&T was.  “I hate the dropped calls” many people told me.  This to me is not just a knock against the iPhone.  It is a huge reason not to get it.  It’s like saying, “I got this new car today — the leather seats are beautiful and the stereo system is unmatched.  Unfortunately it stalls out on me a lot.”  This reason alone would prevent me from buying one until they fixed this issue.  Remember that this is a phone and if the phone part doesn’t work then I don’t see much sense in getting it.

Then I heard about the Droid.  It was supposedly the first real competition to the iPhone that Verizon had.  That interested me because I am happy with Verizon’s network.  I did a bunch of reading when it first came out.  It had all kinds of glitches — the largest one seemed to be in the camera.  Due to some very strange bug the auto-focus wouldn’t work on certain days of the month.  Then all of a sudden the issue would clear itself up.  I waited and watched and then heard about the patch that was sent out to fix this issue.  So maybe the phone was ready for me, or I for it.  And besides, it has a navigation appliucation that gives turn-by-turn directions and it’s free.

The Purchase

I went to two places to test it out.  I was pleased to learn that I could use the keyboard right out of the gate with no problems.   The second time I went I knew I was going to buy it.  Neither salesman knew about the camera glitch which was scary to me. Either they are uninformed about their own product or are hiding that among other things.  The first salesman showed me the things he liked about it which were OK I guess.  He liked the video and that did seem to be pretty good.  I realized that the device had so many features I had to take it home and try it myself to see if it was worth it or not. Oh and by the way. If a Droid salesperson tries to sell you a plastic film screen protector for ten bucks, show him this:

The Experience

So from here on I am going to tell you my impressions, both good and bad, about the device, reminding you that I am not a technical device reviewer.  As a matter of fact this is my first touch screen smart phone, so some of my missteps might have been due to lack of experience.  Hopefully that will give you a better snapshot (sorry for the pun) for yourself.

My overall impression of the Droid so far is that it is a bit kludgy and is still so new that all the bugs haven’t been worked out yet.  There are a lot of neat things about it, and will probably be an excellent choice in a year from now.  Whether or not I put up with its idiosyncracies and lack of app support remains to be seen.  Here are my impressions of the things I have worked with so far:

Twitter

This was one of my high points of interest — since I use Twitter so much I wanted an easy way to “check in” on the rare occasion I am away from my computer.  I have so far been disappointed in the lack of app support here.  Twidroid is apparently the most popular Twitter client. So far I have downloaded it twice and deleted it both times as I became frustrated with it. I am more familiar with Seesmic Desktop as it is closer to Tweetdeck which is my desktop app of choice. (Tweetdeck claims they will support the Droid but no target date is set.) Seesmic has worked but I couldn’t figure out how to send out a general tweet — one that wasn’t a reply to someone.  I wanted to send out a quick tweet this afternoon stating that I drove an hour just to see the movie Avatar, again, but this time in IMAX 3D. (Ok I realize I just outed myself as a real nerd, in case you didn’t know me as one already.) I sat in the movie theater conscious of the crowd around me thinking, “Oh he’s one of those…” as I fumbled around with it. I never figured out how to send a general tweet in Seesmic so I navigated to Twitter.com and sent the update.  I got an error message saying that something couldn’t be completed. I tried to access my profile on Seesmic to see if it updated but every time I did that I get a “connection error”.  Alas, I thought, I’ll just have to wait to be one of those tweeters who tweets with his phone.  Later, when I got out of the movie, I was surprised to see that in my Notifications window I did have 4 replies to that tweet so it made it after all. And when I got home I figured out how to send a general tweet. There is a button on the phone itself, (not part of the software) that has bars across it. When you hit that you are able to compose a general tweet. Not very intuitive, but I now know how to do it at least.  I’ll have to check with @Seesmic to see why I can’t access my profile with their software. UPDATE 9/30/09: So far Seesmic hasn’t been able to solve this issue but at least they responded to me via their Twitter account.  I tried @Twidroid for the third time and now since I am a bit more familiar with how apps work on the Droid I am able to do everything I need so I switched over, hopefully for the last time.  Am still a bit annoyed that in order to get URL shortening automatically I will have to upgrade to their paid version. Ooops!! Wrong again. For some reason you have to upgrade if you want to use bit.ly. There are several other choices for URL shortening in the free app.  I am starting to like Twidroid more and more. I especially like the image upload application Twitgoo. Might have to start using the camera a bit more. :)

Navigation

This was another big sell for me — I used to have navigation on my Blackberry and loved it.  I really missed having it when I got rid of it.  The Google navigation system is free and offers spoken turn by turn directions.  When you fire it up it reminds you that it is still in beta and it’s not their fault if you end up in Texarkana after you told it to send you to Dallas.  In earlier reviews I heard of it sending people the wrong way down a one way street and was it just a coincidence that that was the first time they tried it.  I figured that it would be a good opportunity to test it out as I needed to go ten miles north of Baltimore to some movie theater complex where I had never been.  With a relatively fully charged batter I was off.  I did not purchase the accessory that would stick it in the window or attach it to a vent, but it stayed nicely in the cup holder and I could still hear it quite clearly as it told me how to get out of my neighborhood.  My wife hates this type of thing, and it was chatty until I hit the highway but I didn’t mind it.  My wife hates Avatar too so I was going it alone anyway.  As I was on 70 it was kind of neat as I was approaching a long sweeping curve to the left and the map on the screen indicated the same thing.  Since the screen stays full the entire time I could literally watch the battery drain itself.  Luckily I did purchase a charger for the car which is a necessity if you are going to use the navigation feature.  The battery was charged about at 85% when I left. I used the navigation for an hour, used it for two minutes in the theater and about 15 minutes into navigating home the battery was completely drained.  And as far as accuracy goes there was one little glitch where on the way home it told me to go right on a street that I was supposed to be going right on, but it didn’t name it properly.

The Phone Calls

Honestly I haven’t talked much on it yet but the times I have spoken have been glitch free and very clear.  This is what I expected as I have been with Verizon for quite some time.

The Notifications Panel

A lot of people talk about this. When you get an email or even a Twitter reply you get a notification in a thin window at the top of the screen.  It took me a bit to figure that to open the messages you needed to drag this window down with your finger (I’m a tapping kind of guy myself) to see the messages. It also comes with a cool notification sound — the familiar “d-r-o-i-d” sound you hear in commercials.  I had it in my pocket at the grocery store last night and heard this “Droid” sound. I learned that it came from me.  For now I like it — we’ll see how long before I change it to something else.

The Camera

I never buy a phone for the camera. I have a camera for that.  I would take the odd picture with the old LG but never used them for anything because they never turned out well enough for me.  The Droid has a 5 megapixel camera.  Maybe I could use it in times where I forget to bring the camera, which is quite often.  It even has a flash.  I was very frustrated when I first used it.  It took eight tries to get one picture of Charlie, my first born son (pictured here).  The reason is because of the delay when you press the button to the time the picture is actually taken.  What happened to pressing the button to take the picture at that exact instant?  Even newer cameras have a delay these days.  But the Droid is worse in this regard.  Push the button. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, then the picture is finally taken.  I took these two pictures.  The second one was easier because my daughter would sit still for me when I asked her to. UPDATE 12/30/09: It appears if you hold the Take Picture “button” down after it beeps at you twice it is ready. Pretty close to the instant that you release the button the picture is taken.  This might be better for me.  Also, there is another button on the top of the camera itself, a physical one, that takes pictures. This response time seemed to be in line with other modern cameras.

 

The neat thing about the camera is the “Share” feature. It allows you to share with Facebook, Email/Gmail and a few other places. Twitter was noticeably absent until I installed Seesmic.  I just tried to share this picture through that mechanism about half a dozen times and gave up.  It does seem to be possible but it takes some getting used to.  I will play with it later.

The Flash

I tried taking pictures with the flash and got even more frustrated.  The flash is an LED flash which in layman’s terms means it’s not as good as the one on your camera.  I took several pictures last night and none of them were usable. Maybe I need to play with it a bit.  I expect to use the camera a bit more than I did with my old phone, but I don’t plan to rely on it.  The video is supposed to be better and I did take one short one that was neither good nor bad.  I may write more about it as I test it out more in the future.

The Video

I went ahead and took a short (maybe a minute or two) video of our dogs this morning and tried to share it as I did the pictures.  It told me the file was too large to send as an attachment.  I then tried to upload it to YouTube and it said the file was too large — it could only upload via WiFi.  My network system at home is wired so I was unable to upload it.  The file was over 30MB.  I will play with it later to determine what is the best way for me to be able to do this. UPDATE 12/29/09: I recorded a lo-res video which is easier for sending. I recorded a 49 second video and sent it to Twitter via Seesmic, which uses Yfrog as one of its video partners.  The video was okay for low resolution, but when played back the sound was at normal speed but the video was sped up.  See what I mean here: http://yfrog.us/2ttkoz.  Not very useful. If I want to use the video for anything I guess I will record at hi-res, pull out the battery and the mini-SD card, put it in the adapter and insert it into my PC where I can work on it there.  Again, not an elegant solution.  I later tried this again with Twidroid, (the free version) which also uses YFrog. The same thing happened (see http://yfrog.us/e9thbz). I wanted to change video services to see what would happen but apparently you can only do that in the Pro version of Twidroid. Stay tuned to see if YFrog will answer my question.

The Storage

The Droid comes with a 16 GB mini SD card.  When I found out that it was removable I was pyched.  I am always taking pictures and videos on my camera, popping out the SD card and transferring the goods to my computer keeping the storage clean for my camera.  I later realized it is a mini SD card which will need an adapter to be able to stick it in that same slot in my PC (another expense, albeit only $5. at Radio Shack).  It is also much harder to take out and put back in because it’s so small and delicate.  On top of that the battery must be removed first.  Kind of makes it inconvenient to use the same way I do my camera.

Web Browsing

This is an area the Droid is supposed to excel because of it’s relatively large screen.  Thankfully I can navigate the Kids Are Heroes web site pretty well with it, but certainly would not want to have to be browsing the web for long periods of time.  I have a much bigger screen at home for that.  What really surprised me was something I discovered when I went to my blog page.  The surprise was twofold.  First that a major functionality that is used widespread across the web does not work, and secondly, that I didn’t read about it in any other reviews.  My blog page has a small feature that is Adobe Flash enabled.  It doesn’t work.  There are many sites that use Flash for enhancement and some that depend on it.  Grooveshark was a big one I wanted to use.  I could use the phone as an iPod by going to Grooveshark and setting up a long list of songs to listen to.  How cool is that? I wouldn’t have to download anything or use up my precious space. Grooveshark requires Flash.  So does Fancast and Hulu.com, where I can catch up with my favorite TV episodes.  No more Hawaii 5-0 for me!  The message from Adobe is that they will support Android (the Droid’s operating system) in “mid-2010″.  Who knows when that will actually happen?

Pinch and Zoom

If you are an iPhone user you know what this is. It’s also called “multitouch” which allows you to “pinch” the screen to zoom out and open your fingers to zoom in.  The Droid doesn’t natively support this, even though it has the capability.  They claim the reason is that double-tapping is an easier method to do it. I learned from @holtmurray that the Dolphin browser does allow Pinch and Zoom (and so do a few other apps like PicSay). Thanks Holt!  My quick take on it is that the iPhone is a bit smoother in its implementation of this function.

Other Quirks

If you have read other reviews about it you discover that when you run an application and “back” out of it, the application is still running on the Droid.  Do this a bunch of times and the memory will be clogged which will slow down the phone quite a bit.  Doesn’t this sound like a bug? You can’t exit the applications??  The salesperson will tell you “there’s an app for that!”  And there is.  You have to launch another application to kill the ones you have been using.  It isn’t even on the phone by default.  The salesperson installed it at my request.  It all seems ok with them because “it’s free.”  As someone who works in the software industry I just don’t how this was released this way. 

I downloaded a free ringtone app which provides a bunch of free ring tones. I found the theme song from the movie “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” with Clint Eastwood, one of my all time faves. (Got quite a few looks in the restaurant last night when that went off.)  I thought it would be appropriate to include this theme song in the review, describing all three:

The Good

The voice quality on the phone is really nice.  It’s also nice to have fewer dropped calls, but I am used to that.  One thing I noticed is it’s very comfortable to use as compared to the old Blackberry.  I do love the larger screen size and the touch screen interface.  When I start to figure things out and find workarounds for problems I bet I will like it even more.  I am so happy with the keyboard.  This is the best one I have tried even covering the other smart phones including the Blackberry.  I love the turn by turn navigations. There was an update to Google maps just last night that I downloaded, so I’m sure that will improve as time goes on.  One other neat thing about the navigation is that you can create a shortcut on your home screen that when you touch it it will navigate you from wherever you are back home.  The voice search is really cool.  You click a microphone next to the search button, speak to it and it searches for what you are looking for.  You must dictate very clearly though. Last night in the restaurant my 11 year old daughter told it to look for “Nags Head Beach Rentals” and it came back with “Nude Beach Rentals”.  Her second attempt gave us more appropriate results. And I know that many phones give you sports information, but this is something that I have been without so lookout NFL.com.  I also love the notifications.  You can set it up to beep at you when you get emails and even Twitter replies.  I don’t know if other phones can do that but I love this about the Droid.

The Bad

Not supporting Flash web sites will be a big annoyance for me until it is fixed.  Not that I spend a lot of time surfing the web with it, but it is a big detraction in my mind.  I am also disappointed with the camera and its flash.  I will only use it during the day if I forget my real camera.  Even though they will tell you how many apps support this phone, you may find this area lacking at least for now.

Update 12/31/09: Ok this one is really bad. Just when I was getting to like this phone more and more… A couple of times I have dialed the phone by mistake and wanted to end the call immediately.  To my complete chagrin (only sometimes) when I pull the phone away from my ear the screen is blank and there is nothing that you can do.  Touching the screen does nothing.  You can’t even seem to turn the phone off at that point.  At the time I chalked it up to “I don’t know how to use this phone yet.”  But now that I am more familiar with it I wanted to investigate.  I reproduced the problem and the screen would sometimes faintly show up but just for a fleeting second.  I had read about a “bad bunch of Droids” that had a similar problem so I called the sales guy who sold me the phone.  He told me in so many words that “I know that this doesn’t make sense, but all the Droids I have sold seem to have this issue.  If you lay the phone flat on a table the screen will reappear.”  I tried that and he was right. This has nothing to do with the screen timeout settings either. I just posted this issue in the Droid forum and will update here if there is any better solution. I can get the phone to lay flat in my hand and have the screen come back – if you hit the Speaker phone then it seems to stay up from there. Ok – here’s another update to this issue.  And at risk of making myself look stupid, I am going to tell you anyway. I am now pretty convinced it has little do to with laying the phone flat on the table. After reading this post in another forum, I learned how the sensor works.  There is a proximity sensor that is on the phone that will save the battery life and prevent you from pressing unwanted buttons with your ear.  It shuts off the screen and makes the screen unreceptive.  When you move the phone away from your ear it is supposed to resume normal operation to let you end the call, put on speaker phone or whatever.  That’s where I was having the problem. Sometimes it would be fine, others no.  It turns out that the proximity sensor is fairly sensitive and if you are holding the phone a certain way (i.e. with your thumb on it or close to it) the screen will go blank.  It’s in the upper left part of the screen and guess where my thumb likes to hang out??  Well at least I know about it and now you do too. So I’m back to lovin’ the Droid!

The Ugly

Having to run an application to kill other apps is just crazy to me.  If you have the phone you will find glitches where some things don’t work as they should. Hopefully this will improve quickly over time.

Update 01/02/10: A Twitter colleague (thanks @SeanWest) posted a very interesting article that seems to contradict the need for an application killer, the very thing I have been complaining about.  It’s a bit technical and dry, but worth taking a look at: http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/ Although this post seems to be well thought out I’m not totally convinced.  The developer page that is pointed to (which is the “horse’s mouth”) states “Android starts the process when any of the application’s code needs to be executed, and shuts down the process when it’s no longer needed and system resources are required by other applications.”  My question is how does it determine what proces to kill? If I have Twidroid searching for mentions every three minutes, then theoretically this process is always needed and will be a drain on the battery until I kill it.  When asked about battery drainage later on in the comments, the blog poster wrote:”Typically you are only going to see a battery drain from a background application if it continues to use processor cycle, not if it’s just taking up memory. Now if it’s in the background taking up CPU then you need to see if that application has a way to exit it properly.”  This would indicate to me that I am right about my assumption.  Bottom line is use your own judgment and if you have a lot of apps updating themselves at short intervals over extended periods of time then expect to see your battery drain quicker.

So, What’s the Final Answer?

I have until tomorrow to take it back and avoid any penalty whatsoever.  If I do that I will reactivate my sorry old LG, because there is no phone out there that does exactly what I want it to do.  If I keep it for 30 days I just have to pay a $35.00 restocking fee.  Maybe I will at least investigate it a bit further.  I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. I will say one thing – it sure is fun figuring everything out and trying new apps.  The software is still buggy as many times you will be thrown out of an application for no apparent reason. I trust that in a year or so from now things with the Droid will be much better.  I just don’t know if I can wait that long.

If my readers would like me to I may continue writing about the Droid if I keep it.  I may even write about it again anyway. :)

UPDATE 12/29/09: Just discovered a place to help learn about the Droid. http://www.youtube.com/androidtips. They should have that as a shortcut on the home screen.

UPDATE 12/30/09: Another indispensable resource for Droid owners is the Droid forum that I discovered.  My Gmail locked up on me today (on the Droid only) and although it clearly said that I had new emails I couldn’t get at them.  I kept getting a “No Connection” error.  After exhaustive searching on Google I found very little about this issue with some people stating that a hard reset was the only solution (which eliminates all of your software) and others stating that the GMail account must be deleted from Droid and readded.  This is not possible if the GMail account is the primary Droid account.  A knowledgable poster in the Droid forum had the solution which is here.

Read my follow-up post about the Droid here.