First of all, the blog was down due to equipment failure at the host (ie. my brother’s computer). Now it’s back I can get to business!
Last Saturday I bought myself one of these:
Yep thats a (Motorola) Droid smartphone running the Android OS. My old phone was being weird and had battery issues so it was due for an upgrade. I was holding out for Apple to announce a CDMA iPhone which didn’t happen the other week so I caved and went to the competition.
After having the phone for a week my review is “thumbs up”. Aside from the fact it is stylish and fast and nifty, I now have a data plan and full access to the web from anywhere, which means I can make use of services beyond simple text messages. This includes email, a web browser, twitter (more on this in a bit) and of course the app store.
I’m no stranger to a device like this (a portable OS with an app store) since I’ve had an iPad for months now and an iPod Touch for years, but I can’t deny the convenience of carrying it around with me everywhere. The phone also has a GPS chip in it, which means Google Maps runs staggeringly well – even to the point of showing your orientation on the map. I pulled up my location in the living room and it was accurate to 1 meter. I then rotated on the spot and watched my arrow rotate on the screen in real time. Impressive.
There are a few trifling negatives with the phone I have noticed so far: no way to turn the unlock vibration off, the phone can slide open in my pocket and sometimes turn on, people tell me I sometimes sound muffled talking. But some of these are just getting used to a new device. For instance 5 days ago I may have commented on the keyboard being a bit dinky but I’m now very used to it. Similarly what I first thought may have been battery life on the low side got much better when I tweaked settings and installed a task killer app.
The day I got the phone I also (“finally”, some may say) joined Twitter.
Twitter is a social networking mini-blog site that lets user post up to 140 character ‘tweets’ about anything they like. You can follow me at: twitter.com/richardjesper (or click the link on the right)
Twitter will not replace this blog so don’t worry about that. Rather I will use it exclusively from my phone, so it will likely replace the phone blogs I occasionally did (but not the ones with photos – they’ll still go to Robot Claw). If any of you use twitter please post your twitter ID as a comment (or email it to me) so I can follow you (if I am not already).
So overall, I’m digging this Droid phone mostly because of what it now lets me do. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to everyone I know with one reservation – they already have them!
Yep, as is the case with most of my life the world took notice, and once I got a Droid it became the cool thing to do and everyone ran out and got one. This includes KLS, JAF and JBF, and it soon to include (I strongly suspect) SFL. Only BFS is the holdout!
