Yes, I've been borged

[jducoeur]

I gather that I am just one of many who went out and bought a DROID in the first few days it was available. It was kind of an impulse buy, but I had basically spent all of last week talking myself into it, and didn't see much point in waiting.

It's kind of amusing. A week or two ago, Ars Technica had a little blurb on the DROID's ad campaign, that boiled down to, "Yeah, yeah -- it's got a multiprocessing and open development and all that. But who cares about that?" The answer, it seems, is us. I'm not sure whether Verizon deliberately targeted the geeks with this phone, but they seem to have done a good job with it if so.

Anyway, so far I'm reasonably pleased with it. It's responsive, powerful and rather fun to use. The main downside is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself: it *does* do multiprocessing and it *does* have lots of apps, so it is *very* easy to kill your battery. The most important advice I've gotten so far was from Denise, who told me that I needed to get TasKiller as the very first app I bought. This seems to be true: you've got to do active process management on your own if you want decent battery life. Even with that, the battery is only so-so: I can pretty well drain it in 3-4 hours of serious online work. (OTOH, it appears easy to swap batteries, so if it ever becomes a real problem, I can get myself a spare.)

That's really my only complaint, though: in general, I'm enjoying the heck out of it. So far, I've picked up the following apps:

• AK Notepad (a simple, well-reviewed notepad app), Rehearsal Assistant (a voice recording app) and Note Everything (which does both, and may be the one I really keep);


• Andoku (an adequate Sudoku game) and OpenSudoku (which is pretty great, but doesn't auto-generate new puzzles -- you have to download them);


• Astro (a pretty full-featured file manager for getting under the hood);


• The Bank of America online banking app;


• Documents To Go (the old Palm classic, that lets you read and edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint -- currently on sale for $15);


• Google Sky Map (silly but cool: it shows you the constellations in whatever direction the phone is facing);


• Jewellust (a *horribly* addictive Bejeweled variant), and of course a Solitaire implementation with Spider;


• Google Listen (Podcast client -- it occurs to me that podcasts are going to be far more useful on this thing than they ever were on my iPod);


• SleepyTime (sleep-noise generator with a remarkably full collection of sounds);


• The Weather Channel app;


• and the aforementioned TasKiller, whose sole purpose is to make it quick and easy to kill processes, individually or all at a shot. I do like the system's stability, and the fact that I *can* kill all of the background processes and everything seems to cope just fine.

I'm curious what the other borgs out there have gotten. What's worth downloading or buying? Which task manager app are you using?

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Documents To Go is a fave of mine, but varies widely in functionality on different OSes. Does the Droid version handle Bookmarks yet?

[jducoeur]

Not that I know of, but I can't say I've dug into it in any real detail. This was mostly bought on the grounds of, "I'm going to need this sooner or later, so I may as well buy it while it's 50% off..."

[dsrtao]

I'm still experimenting. As a replacement for my Treo, it's very good. As an ebook reader, it's not as good as my N800 -- the extra inch of screen makes a big difference in readability. It is, however, an adequate substitute. The browser is excellent. I have not seen any real battery issues -- it lasts all day for a 75th percentile kind of day for me, and charges from 20 to 90% in under an hour.

[jducoeur]

I'm still puzzling out where my battery is going. At least twice I've drained it down to 20% twice in a day, which is significant; OTOH, those were both days when I was *hammering* the machine (not just heavy browsing and mail, but also major downloads), so it may be atypical. On ordinary days, I only seem to be getting down to 70% over the course of the day, which isn't too bad...

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Ugh, the cost of the data plan (with tethering, especially) irks me, though the same is true of G1. I've got an N95 now on T-Mobile -- no 3G in the US, but I pay $10/month for 'web' access, and I can set up tethering with bluetooth, etc. (Also, despite only paying for 'web' access, I seem to be able to access everything... but I think that's a historical fluke due to a strange setup.) The idea of paying 6 times as much just doesn't appeal.

[jducoeur]

I suppose I can understand that, but I really don't care about tethering. (Having a good web browser in the phone itself changes the equations a lot.) So from my POV, it's a mild increase in money (~$20) for *vastly* increased functionality -- not too bad a deal...

[baavgai.livejournal.com]

What firmware version does the thing ship with?

I've had an unlocked Dev phone for some time. I had intended to write some apps for the platform, but don't have anything major yet.

I prefer ES File Explorer to Astro.

For iPhone, I thought Pandora was one of the killer apps. It recently made it to Android.

Barcode Scanner. QR Codes are amusing. They're huge in Japan, I saw one on the poster for "9". I suspect they'll be more popular in the future.

Tricorder is one of those sillinesses that's managed to survive a few purges.

I've yet to find good, free, PDF support. RepliGo does work well, though.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

What firmware version does the thing ship with?

2.0

[jducoeur]

I prefer ES File Explorer to Astro.

Useful to know -- I haven't done much at this level yet, but it's possible down the road.

For iPhone, I thought Pandora was one of the killer apps. It recently made it to Android.

Yeah, my problem is mainly that Pandora doesn't *surprise* me enough. I used the service online for a while, and gradually got bored with it.

I've yet to find good, free, PDF support.

Don't know about free, but DocToGo has it bundled in. Sooner or later I'll get around to actually trying it out...