Comments on: In-Depth Review: Motorola Droid (with some iPhone comparisons)

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:58:19 +0000

I am also trying to determine what Voice Privacy is. If I had to guess I would speculate the feature is for background noise cancellation as those terms are used in the field of Voice Over IP.

By: Keith Formell

Keith Formell — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:48:59 +0000

Thank you for the in-depth review of the Motorola DROID. I found it very well written and most helpful being a new DROID owner. I am curious, I have been trying to connect my “Corporate Calendar” app on the DROID to my Zimbra calendar but without much success. You stated in your artice that you successfully connected and I am wondering how. Specifically the settings which I believe my issue lies with the “Exchange Server” setting….

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

By: Mary Cooperwasser

Mary Cooperwasser — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:36:12 +0000

Great review – the best I’ve read. But when I started and connected with Exchange Server to connect the e-mail, calendar and contacts with my work which uses Zimbra, only the e-mail and calendar worked well – very well. The contacts only brought in about 1/4 of my contacts – about 100 of about 500 no matter what I and the IT people at work did. I finally exported and imported my Zimbra contacts to G-mail and do a work-around which means I have to double entry. Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

By: Bill Leonard

Bill Leonard — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:58:29 +0000

Very nice review – I’m going to make sure I send this along when people I know are looking for good info. As for me … I recently bought a droid & am going to return it. Before going into why, I’ll first say that there are many positive things w/ the droid. I was able to get my droid to receive all my email (yahoo, comcast, gmail) & it integrates email notifications, text messages, and phone calls in the same area. The navigation is nice (google’s street view, real time traffic, restaurants, banks, etc.) can be overlayed. 2 friends who have the blackberry model w/o the physical keyboard really liked the droid’s virtual keyboard. They and another friend w/ an iTouch were impressed w/ the speed at which the droid accessed and rendered web pages. Voice-to-text, the built-in dictionary, and search history help a great deal to cut down on typing. It was also nice to see that when I clicked on an address in a web page, it brought me to the Maps app & searched for that address (similarly, clicking on a phone # brought up the phone app w/ that #). The bulk was an initial issue but … I got used to it.

With that said, my expectations were to have it serve as both a phone and a small PC for email, web browsing, etc. but … it doesn’t cut it for me – the functionality is there but … the usability isn’t. Smart phone usability, for me, is awful b/c of the small keyboards, small screen (w/ the need to zoom in/out), and flakyness of some of the mobile-specific web pages. Browsing is a chore – even when selecting things stored in history – even when zoomed in, I can’t tell u how many times I accidentally click on the wrong links w/ my finger b/c of size & the droid’s high sensitivity. Cutting and pasting web page content to another area is clunky and annoying on the droid. The physical keyboard on the droid is not great & texting is really slow for me now (compared to the non-smart phone). If I just want to read email, it’s ok — but, again, the keyboard makes it hard to respond. The phone itself has lower quality for those on the other end of the call (others online have reported this as well).

I’m finding that if I need non-wifi mobile internet access, that I’ll probably buy an AirCard for my laptop — it’s small enough to fit in the bag I carry & I get the user experience I need. For GPS, I’ll get a stand-alone device.

As for other smart phones, friends of mine bought the iPhone & they like it – and they live in NJ and 3 of them commute to NYC so … they say the coverage issue w/ AT&T isn’t such that they would reconsider their decision.

By: Mark Wheadon

Mark Wheadon — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:29:55 +0000

You say that the iPhone has no equivalent to KeePassDroid? Surely 1Password is a similar beast? It has an iPhone app although I’ve never used it (I use 1Password all the time on my Macs, but my PDA is still a Treo 680).

Mark

By: Joey

Joey — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:47:58 +0000

I had exactly the same issue. I spoke with Verizon Wireless tech support, and they said there is a problem with that for the Motorola Droid and that a software update will come out on January 22, 2010 to address that issue.

By: Droid Review Update | The Changelog

Droid Review Update | The Changelog — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:55:18 +0000

[...] It’s now been nearly a week since I started using the Droid, and I have some updates from my initial review. [...]

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:36:43 +0000

I cannot open a pdf or a jpeg from my email. I get my email from MS exchange server 2007. Is my Quickoffice not working? How do I enable it? It just says it is fetching….and eventually turns off. The files are small on the test email I sent myself. Is there an app to open pdf’s?
thanks

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:15:14 +0000

I use a self-signed SSL cert on IMAP and SMTP servers in conjunction with my iPhone. I was prompted in the mail client to accept the certificates on first connection attempt and it has worked ever since. I haven’t changed my SSL certificates since then however. I am using iPhone OS 3.0 (I think), but the same experience applied for several 2.x series firmwares too. Perhaps your experience is based on a really old (or really new) firmware?

By: Ganesh Sittampalam

Ganesh Sittampalam — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:28:07 +0000

Thanks, this is a really helpful review.

By: Todd Troxell

Todd Troxell — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:43:18 +0000

I found that there is a beta of K-9 email client [freeware hack of the default google client] which adds IDLE support– its a bit crashy right now though. Search K-9 Beta in market.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:05:01 +0000

I haven’t tested it much, but I’m sure they anticipated that with its “airplane” mode, which disables all the wireless features.

It automatically prefers wifi whenever it’s associated with an access point.

The problem you may run into is that you can’t just disable the mobile network data without disabling wifi like you could on a BlackBerry, so you may accidentally access a billable data service (or the phone may do so on your behalf to download mail and the like) when you’re away from an AP.

By: Ivan Lazar Miljenovic

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:23:23 +0000

One thing I’ve always wondered about the Android: how well does it deal with being _off_ the cloud? I’m looking for a new smartphone with a hardware keyboard that I can use to check my emails, etc. over wifi rather than paying for a data plan. Does Android support this kind of behaviour, or do most of its applications assume an always-on internet connection?

By: Milos

Milos — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:14:34 +0000

Thank you for a very nice review.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:17:01 +0000

Yes, I know self-signed certs can work with IMAP on the iPhone, but the point is that getting them to work is a royal undocumented PITA (you have to put them on a server and navigate to them that way.) I never got a prompt to accept it from the mail app, only from the web browser.

Yeah, there are plenty of scientific calculators for both platforms. Some probably more useful than a HP48GX emulator for some tasks. But there is lots to be said in favor of the HP48GX emulator, especially for people with an established code base.

Interesting that the C64 emulator is back, but without BASIC on the iPhone. And thanks for the tip about Frotz; I spot Twisty for Android that I must install this evening ;-)

By: Eric Bostrom

Eric Bostrom — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:32:40 +0000

WBCR,
Two points:
1. Self signed certs do work with iphone mail/IMAPS. They can be incredibly wonky if you change them AFTER setup, but they absolutely do work on first and subsequent connections. Only the first attempt will prompt to accept.

2. PCalc Lite, for iphone: http://www.pcalc.com/iphone/
C64 emu: http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-features/43896-apple-approves-commodore-64-emulator-for-the-iphone
Frotz: http://www.macworld.com/appguide/app.html?id=73703
Though Frotz is more of an interpreter than an emu.