Droid

Those who know me know that I have been patiently waiting for some cool phone from Verizon (maybe not so patiently). I have been using my Motorola RAZR for too long. I remember buying this phone prior to one of my kids being born and my youngest is more than 3 years old, so this phone was old. But it was a trick phone. I have had it so long that the battery has swelled up and doesn't fit the case any more. Whenever I took out the phone, the back would fall off, so it had commedic appeal. The time the back fell off into a bowl of chile was the kicker (I still ate the chile).

Anyway, I was kind of hoping Verizon would deliver an Iphone. Instead they came out with the Droid. It is a good product and I am happy with it. The Droid, manufactured by Motorola, needs to be a hit for both Motorola and Verizon. Motorola needs it for the phone division to remain solvent and competitive in this space. The Droid needs to be a hit for Verizon to stem the tide of defectors going to AT&T and the Iphone. As such the need for this combination to be successful for both companies is very high, and I think they do have a hit here.

The phone for voice calls (the reason for having a phone) is very good. I think it is better than my old RAZR and infinitely better than my old Treo. Reading email is good and the interface is sleek and easy to use. The only issue there is that the service we use for work doesn't allow me to open attachements, but they are still there. I imagine that Good will fix that in the near futurte. The operating system, Google's Android, is really cool. This is my first exposure to that OS. Obviously everyone is familiar with Apple's mobile OS (since I have an Ipod Touch), and this is consistent but different.

The big takeaway I have is that it is super fast. I mean, even maps, using my current location, so nothing that is pre-cached, is really fast. If this was baseball I would administer a drug test and expect to find steroids here it is so fast. But since it is a phone I doubt I'm going to find needle marks anywhere.

The thing I didn't realize is that the different elements can really drain the power. Which is why I have added a new blog to the list of blogs I'm tracking on the right side of this page. You'll see the Tech Broiler blog from Jason Perlow. He is starting a new section called Stupid Droid tricks to teach dummys like me how to efficiently use this device. I did have a problem. My battery drained in like 4 hours. I didn't realize that when every single service is running the machine is draining power. I read Stupid Droid Trick #1 and figured out how to easily turn off services that I don't need like disabling Wi-Fi when I'm not at home. Duh. I'll be looking for more stupid Droid tricks in the future.

Anyway, since I'm a federal employee, and we have to use the Networx contract, my department has had a relationship with Verizon and those are the only services and phones we are allowed to use. Sorry other companies, that is just how it is. So we are piloting the Droid and I really like it. I think this will really work for us. As a pilot tester it is my job to find out these little problems and identify solutions so that if we want to roll it out to the larger community they won't be forced to deal with headaches.