Motorola Droid

[zanzabar]

i dont get what makes it so special its the same as every other slider smart phone and WM6.5 is better than android IMO so why not just get the TP2 or Td2 or go get a thd2 with the snapdragon. the snapdragon puts everything else to shame

[shoota]

The Droid is just good at integrating all the Google features while also putting together some good specs. It's not perfect of course but what is. I don't hear too many people say they like WM. What exactly do you like about it?

[HuffPCair]

friend got one of these I'm not inpressed.

What????

You are either stuck on Apple or you havent messed with it other than looking at it.
Its a great phone and I think blows away any other phone I have owned. The Andriod OS stuff is going to blow away everyone in my opinion.

I can not really find anything I do not like about it yet. Nice size, not to shabby battery life, great speed all around, just a well built phone.

[nysulli]

my wife has a droid and I have an Eris, we both love them, I got screwed because my Eris was free vs $200 for the droid since she started with a BB Tour which she hated, and traded for the droid since she had to have a physical keyboard.

keep in mind I'm coming from an alias and she had an envy. I love the speed of the droid, its noticeably faster then the Eris, but I really prefer the layout and software on the Eris, HTC did a great job with the software, my wife feels the same way, and if it wasn't for the lack of physical keyboard on the Eris, its what she would have gotten.

I haven't spent a ton of time playing with smartphones in the past, but I am really impressed with both the software and the phones so far, and at the rate their selling I'm sure the app market is going to be comparable to the iphones before long

[shoota]

Yeah android is good. I can't say that 10,000 apps isn't enough because iphone's app store has so many duplicates that it kind of inflates the 100,000 or whatever they're claiming. I think most of the apps ppl use most often are on android's market too..

[123bob]

OK, I have some time on my Droid to report. I started using it for "normal" business now and find I can make about two days on the battery with my use profile.

Some explanation is need for my next few comments.....

I have been a hard core anti-tech type person for the things I do in my business that count. I have kept a paper appointment calender for the last 25 years of my professional life. I refused all attempts to go to PDAs, Smartphones, etc. I couldn't stand folks looking at their little gadgets and pretending that they were somehow more "productive". To me they wasted lots of time on the operation of the "gadget" and not enough on the business concept in front of them.

Why am I so sold on the Droid? It's a game changer for me. Rather than carrying a cell phone, I now have a real pocket computer that happens to be a decent phone too. I find myself using it more for applications that have nothing to do with talking to someone on the phone.

.....and with the "talk-to-me-keyboard" app I can FINALLY out-text my Daughter.... Priceless......

Regards,
Bob

EDIT: @Zanzabar, are you the same Z as my teamate at TR? If so, Howdy over here.... :END EDIT

[Diverge]

The Droid is my first smartphone, and I gotta say I love mine. It's like a mini computer.

I'll love it more soon as it's rooted and I can get rid of all the built in stuff I don't want or need running all the time.

[shoota]

alright guys time for the monthly droid update. how's are you all feeling about it now?

[jettasin00]

Im still loving it. Using the web, sports scores, apps for anything ive wanted. Get a full day from the battery and just charge it up at night and its ready for the next day. Just every now and then need to do a forced restart. Maybe done 3 since i picked it up on launch day. Got a shirt the other day with $25 off coupons for friends. Still debating on the car kit. I have a tomtom already so dont really need it. I do use the maps when traveling for traffic conditions along my route.

[zanzabar]

EDIT: @Zanzabar, are you the same Z as my teamate at TR? If so, Howdy over here.... :END EDIT

yup same one



for the people who like the phone and its their 1st smart phone or came from a BB or iphone. do u like the features and or the accessibility, im just trying to find why winmo dosnt get any respect when it has the same functionality and faster devices

[shoota]

yup same one



for the people who like the phone and its their 1st smart phone or came from a BB or iphone. do u like the features and or the accessibility, im just trying to find why winmo dosnt get any respect when it has the same functionality and faster devices

my only experience with winmo is how my mom felt about her htc phone. and she hated it with a passion. she found it extremely convoluted, annoying things like it not ringing on calls and texts. mostly little annoying things that added up to one big problem. she just got an iphone to replace it and seems to like it ok.

[zanzabar]

what phone was it and did she ever flash the rom on it, and not getting notification for calls so u go to an iphone is hilarious

[shoota]

htc tilt maybe? i never really looked at it much and of course she didn't flash the rom. what's so hilarious about someone hating their phone and using their upgrade to get the world's most popular phone? not everyone is an apple hater ya know

[zanzabar]

no its funny becouse the #1 thing that gets complaints on the iphone is that it dose not notify for calls and texts and is supposedly a vary common problem. so what u are saying is that its becouse its a smart phone but it has no learning curve or tweaking to make it work so it more like using a feature phone (like what the iphone or BB are, except they have an arm chip) people like

[shoota]

yeah i hear ya. it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. i think it boils down to bad at&t service in her area

[AzraelDarkangel]

Definitely a big step in the right direction. What's up with the camera? All the reviews I've read show the camera having issues and being very low quality for a 5mp? I'm spoiled a bit after seeing pics from high-end Nokias and Sony Ericsson (and even the better Samsung models). It's nice to see the 800/854x480 becoming standard along with capacitive touchscreens. (I still want a ~4in 1920x1080 OLED capacitive screen though with HDMI out, the Japanese have had 1024x480 screen phones out over a year.)

I'm getting a Palm Pixi or Pre though with my next paycheck (the Pixi keyboard is small but awesome!). I wish Android and Palm WebOS would have a lovechild. Flash 10.1 is available for WebOS that can render all flash content the same as a desktop computer. I also like Sprints plans better than Verizon. I'll see what's out next summer or fall, my favorite phones out now are probably the Nokia N900 and the Samsung Omnia HD but I can't afford an unlocked phone like that right now.

[zanzabar]

the palm devices are to slow to use flash for anything useful, u need a snapdragon to get flash to work so that means that u need an HTC HD2 or one of the android/winmo that will be out early next year and u need a leak of a flash build as im not of any that work on android or winmo.

i cant see why u would want sprint they have worse coverage than ATT for data and they have bad voice and no gsm plans. i would get an att, tmobile or verizon only since a gsm sim is a key feature to me.

[shoota]

verizon has gsm sim?

[zanzabar]

verizon has gsm sim?

yes the TP2 and the amagio and other world phones all have gsm sims, they still have the cdma and have to be activated but they have gsm sims also

[shoota]

oh cool. how important is it to wait for the new LTE network to roll out. how future proof are current gen phones knowing a new network is coming?

[dietwaterrr]

the palm devices are to slow to use flash for anything useful, u need a snapdragon to get flash to work so that means that u need an HTC HD2 or one of the android/winmo that will be out early next year and u need a leak of a flash build as im not of any that work on android or winmo.

i cant see why u would want sprint they have worse coverage than ATT for data and they have bad voice and no gsm plans. i would get an att, tmobile or verizon only since a gsm sim is a key feature to me.

did you read any reviews of the HD2? what's wrong with the droid?

[zanzabar]

did you read any reviews of the HD2? what's wrong with the droid?

i said for flash, u cant use it with less than a snapdragon to play back video on any reasonable resolution. the droid is slow compaired to anything thats got the snapdragon its so much faster than the 500-600mhz arm stuff that we have now unless u had some sort of video acceleration

[dietwaterrr]

yeah... droid doesn't even play flash right now. Videos pretty unclear on hq youtube.

I just read two reviews of the HD2. They seem to both say the snapdragon is a beast, but the software sucks.

[AzraelDarkangel]

Palm Pre W/Flash:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpI6gA9cuME

Some info on the Arm Cortex A8 from an iPhone 3GS review:
http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/sho...spx?i=3579&p=2

I'm searching for actual benchmarks for both the Cortex A8 and Snapdragon but the general opinion is that the CPU of the Snapdragon is a bit faster but the GPU of the Cortex A8 is a bit faster depending on the application. For example:

http://www.howardforums.com/showpost...&postcount=881

OMAP 3430 vs snapdragon... Both application processors are cortex a8 based so at 1GHz the snapdragon would be faster and draw more power. On the 3d side the 3430 has a GPU that pushes 18.5M triangles and about 662M pixels per second @ 530MHz the specs on the current snapdragon chipset list 22M triangles and 133M pixels per second. Not sure why the fill rate is so bad on the snapdragon but qualcomm didn't exactly go for 3d muscle in its MSM7500 series either so their GPU may simply be gimped with respect to fill rate. If this is true then the current snapdragon would be better and significantly worse then the OMAP 3430 depending on the application or benchmark.

and:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=576627

Your assessment of which is faster is true. The GPU on the OMAP is a PowerVR SGX which performs better than the Snapdragon GPU which is an AMD Z430. I hope someone else can provide more details on what exactly that means for running applications like the new google navigator.

Anyway, regardless you don't "need" Snapdragon to run flash, and don't forget about Opera and Skyfire which have very good flash support too on many devices.

I'm looking forward to the Arm Cortex A9:
http://www.driverheaven.net/news.php?newsid=315

An industry insider told us today that in 2010 there will be a push from ARM to have Cortex A9 dual core Cpus in the next generation of mobile phones. These processors are set to manufacturered to the 32nm process and will be supplied from possibly both Globalfoundries and TMSC. Globalfoundries however might not be ready for this process in 2010.

ARM are also pushing HD content as well as OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics support and the focus will be on AMOLED screens with HDMI out support. With the high consumer demand still for nifty gadgets it seems a really lucrative market for these companies. When we hear more information will be following up on the story.

Read more: ARM set to release dual core mobile phones - DriverHeaven.net http://www.driverheaven.net/news.php...#ixzz0ZBwVV2J8

http://www.slashgear.com/st-ericsson...video-0362588/

The ST-Ericsson U8500 uses an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore SMP dual-core processor paired with the ARM Mali-400 OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG1.1 GPU; together, they’re capable of outputting 1080p HD video in a smartphone form-factor.

[AzraelDarkangel]

i cant see why u would want sprint they have worse coverage than ATT for data and they have bad voice and no gsm plans. i would get an att, tmobile or verizon only since a gsm sim is a key feature to me.

Uhh..Actually no, example:

http://technologizer.com/2009/06/29/...sprint-vs-att/

–The performance varied a lot from city to city.

–Out of the 13 cities, Verizon got the highest reliability rating in seven and Sprint got the highest one in six. AT&T didn’t score highest in reliability in any cities, and was often far behind its two competitors.

–Verizon got the highest download score in seven cities; Sprint scored highest in four; AT&T in two.

–AT&T had the highest upload score in ten cities; Sprint was highest in two; Verizon in only one.

Verizon of course has the best 3G coverage followed by Sprint. Just like in their recent commercial wars; Verizon has better coverage, AT&T might be a bit faster. I'll take reliability over a small difference in speed any day.

I can totally understand why you would want GSM. I would buy an unlocked GSM phone if I had the money right now. Essential if you travel outside the US. I haven't heard anything about voice issues with Sprint compared to others in the reviews I've read. Every carrier has customers that either love them or hate them for various reasons. I wasn't suggesting that there is anything superior about Palm/Sprint vs. Droid/Verizon, just that it is reasonable for my needs right now. I'm still keeping an eye on the Droid along with everything else that's available till I make a purchase. I much prefer the keyboard on the Palm Pixi and I love the look of the WebOS software. However it doesn't have WiFi and the camera is very low quality. The camera on the Droid looks good if they can fix the focus issues and the large screen is very nice. However the keyboard seems very flat and mushy when I checked out the display model.