Now that I’ve been using the Droid for a week, an update is in order. My love affair with this device is still strong as ever. I’ve got my contacts fully organized, loaded a few GB’s worth of music and found a few apps that are really great.
I have found that using the “glass” keyboard is just as easy as using the slide out keyboard. In fact it is easier to some degree to use the touch screen keyboard for some of the applications. The touch screen keyboard is readily able to determine which letter I wanted, even with my big fingers covering multiple letters.
I’ve been some what surprised by the battery life. Especially after hearing about the iPhone 3G’s dismal battery performance. If I use the Droid as a mini-PC, entering contact data, heavily browsing the web, loading and running a lot of different applications, the battery lasts me about a 24-hour day. The screen depletes the battery faster than anything else that I do. In a typical day where I use the phone for about an hour, the music player for 3 hours and perform a few searches with the browser, the battery life would last me about 2 days before needing a recharge.
I found the easiest way to load music onto the device is to plug it into the USB port and mount the device as a drive on my PC. The SD card is fully accessible as a mounted device. The one snafu I found is that earlier versions of the Droid had thier music directory on the root of the SD card. The current verision expects the music directory to be in the \DCIM directory. The snafu is not with the Droid device itself, but with all the personal websites that exist that provide directions. Once I had the correct directory it was an easy process to drag-n-drop the music files. The music application itself takes a few minutes to index the first time you run the application after every time new music is loaded. I noticed when music is added I have to be patient and give the software a minute or two before I look for the new titles.
The one application that is a must load for everyone is aptly titled “Where”. This app allows you to search for just about anything based on where you’re currently located. It will pull up news, weather and even gas prices in proximity to you. I’m heading to Chicago tomorrow and am looking forward to a real world opportunity to try out the application.
The one draw back to the device is the quality of the speaker during cell phone usage. The speaker is on par with the everyday cell phone, but is no where near the quality you get with the bluetooth headset. In hands free mode the speaker is serviceable. But overall quality is worse than when used as a traditional phone brought up to your ear. 99% of the time I use a bluetooth headset, so this isn’t really an issue for me.
Overall, I’m very happy with my purchase.