12Dec/090
Motorola DROID one month in
I’ve had the Motorola DROID for about a month now. It’s my first smart phone, and only my second phone with a color display, so I’m catching up on the last several years of phone innovation.
Early impressions:
- Battery life is much lower than my K1m. I have to charge it every night or it’ll be dead sometime the next day. If it spends all day in my dead-zone of a basement, the battery is kaput by sundown. The the DROID is generally said to have good battery life. I’d hate to see what bad battery life looks like.
- Killer apps so far are ShopSaavy, Google Maps with turn-by-turn directions, and Google Places
- Get the car mount and car charger; who needs a dedicated GPS?
- Having email and a web browser wherever I am is kickass
- Screen is gorgeous, and touch interface is very responsive
- Switching from landscape to portrait is laggy but reliable
- My K1M would fit in the pistol magazine pocket of my 5.11s. The DROID is too big so it goes in a front pocket, which sucks. Too bad phone holsters are so gay and flimsy
- Verizon service fairly reliable, but forget 3G inside my aluminum-sided house
- Camera is crap. Do some people really use their phone’s camera exclusively?
- Physical keyboard is usable, but I never use it. Onscreen keyboard is fine for me
- Wifi sucks battery life like an electron vampire. Don’t use it.
- Google Latitude is fun but I can’t figure out what it’s used for
- FourSquare is cool but I keep forgetting to check in to places I go
- I haven’t taken advantage of Android’s open architecture, but it feels good knowing that Steve Jobs can go fuck himself
Overall, I like it and don’t want to go back. If I had to pay for the service myself instead of expensing it, I probably wouldn’t do it, just because it’s not worth the $100 to me.