State Your Droid PRO'S & CON'S

[ThePhoneGuy]

I'm very new to the phone - just got the DROID today. So far a CON I have encountered is the inability to delete individual calls from the call log. The only option is to delete the entire log? That doesn't seem right - I must be missing something.

QUICK HELP

Press and hold down the call you want to delete, a menu will pop up with options, press remove.

[ThePhoneGuy]

I'll preface - been waiting 2 years beyond my contract being up, nursing a treo 650 waiting for a phone with specs like this to come out. Exchange was a must have deal killer as it is a major part of my business and communications. The treo died before this came out so borrowed someone's Blackberry 8830 and became pretty familiar with it (although couldn't get it to sync wirelessly or through computer).

CONS
1)Lost entire email and calendar after one day. Account was still there but couldn’t get into settings, had to reset it up (but for some reason it kept all contacts).
2)It doesn’t push calendar – must hit refresh. Entered something on computer – after 10 – 15 minutes still hadn’t updated on Droid. No setting options to change on this.

3)Can’t save .jpg attachments from email - just says "Fetching attachment photo.jpg" for 5 minutes. I cancelled it. Photo was only 164kb.

4)Email – can’t put a signature in. Can’t select to delete only from handheld (this isn't as big)

5)Can’t file an email into another folder

6)Can’t keep more than a month of email, can’t mark an email to save on Droid indefinitely (if you need for reference for example)

7)Can’t change display style of contacts (last, first)
8)After ending a call, can’t easily pull up contact’s alternate phone numbers (my old Palm Treo 650 was awesome - hit end and it goes directly back to the contact entry and one down click and enter and it dials the contact's next number). Perhaps there is another way? Haven't actually played with this too much.

9)NO TASK LIST application native????? Obviously doesn’t sync with exchange. There are apps you can download – but not sync natively with built in EAS in Google.
10)NO MEMO/NOTE application native???? Same as task list – there are apps, but not to sync natively with EAS. To sync tasks/notes, appears to require two separate apps, not use built-in EAS and they may conflict – haven’t tried it.
11)Camera is so slow to take a picture it is almost useless, picture quality – fair at best indoors (if the business end of exchange active sync actually worked I wouldn't care much about this)

12)Screen protectors are impossible to get on without dust entrapped – almost a dozen other phone/camera screens and I have never had a problem before – went through all 3 and last was best but still had a spec caught. My suggestion is find some 3rd party offering before buying the Verizon offering.


How can you classify anything as a business oriented smart phone without a task list???? And one that syncs so you don’t have to maintain two task lists separately.

PROS
*Mapping – overlaid with satellite is fast and beautiful.

*Voice search

*Marketplace seems pretty robust with more than one option for everything I searched for, sometime ridiculous number of options.
*Fluidity - although I had to remove a calculator app that slowed it to a crawl.

*Vertical on-screen keyboard - I am shocked how well I can type on it. I have tried on many an iphone and couldn't get much right. This seems pretty good.
*I agree with another post - I think it is awesome design and all business.
*hard keyboard better than I initially thought - in store I couldn't spell a single word right (was hoping I would get used to it). Quickly learned I had to use my thumbnails and do much better.



FINAL THOUGHTS
If someone has solutions for my cons above I would love to hear them. I am shocked at the lack of options and settings - I guess typical of Google. My 4 year old Treo could sync better, had more options to save, delete, add signatures, etc. To be an iphone competitor they better up the game on the options as it severely limits the "experience".

It always amazes how somethings are so thought-out when developing a cell phone, some are fantastic, and some elementary things pertaining to a smart phone are left out. AMAZING

I guess will always face a trade off when owning a cell phone. Sometimes i believe its a market strategy cell phone developers use, ALWAYS LEAVING YOU WANTING MORE.

[sparkyaclown]

Pros:
Great battery life
Good customization
Responsive touch screen
Music player

Cons:
No manual included - I could have done without the crappy quick start guide and been happier with an actual manual.

Camera is very grainy for a 5mp, actually a pretty crappy pic. I wouldn't call it print quality.

[gardobus]

If you go into the call log and hold down on any entry for a few seconds, a menu pops up that includes "Remove from call log"

The long-press is light Androids right click, and once you get used to trying it in several places you find lots of little things you didn't know about lol

[Steve]

Pros:
Great battery life
Good customization
Responsive touch screen
Music player

Cons:
No manual included - I could have done without the crappy quick start guide and been happier with an actual manual.

Camera is very grainy for a 5mp, actually a pretty crappy pic. I wouldn't call it print quality.

droid manual http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/...000202474a.pdf

[normwerner]

OK, I've had my Droid since last Friday, so I've had a bit of time to play and add apps and see what it will do, at least for me. I'm not into music, so I haven't tried anything in that realm except to set up a Pandora radio station, which works fine. I was more interested in finding out how closely I could tie it into the rest of my home office compute environment - what things that I can do or share between my desktop (now mostly used as a file and porint server) and my laptop over my WIFI net.

Let me preface the remainder of this post by admitting that I'm little more than a power user of PC's. I'm not a techie, although I'd admit to be a wanta-be sometimes. I've been around PCs since they were invented and worked for Digital Equipment Corp in sales when they were invented (that may give you a clue that I'm also and old dude). I'm not afraid to install hardware or software into PC's but I haven't a clue how to write software. I do create and maintain several Web sites, but that is just knowing how to use a good Website development tool. I'm basically a user, who knows just enough to get into deep dodo every now and then, but who isn't afraid to try things.

The good news for me is that I can share almost everything that I need to access. I have installed the Estongs File Manager and the DocsToGo Apps and set up my WIFI network to allow access to my laptop and desktop files. This all works grerat. I can "see" my word and excel and powerpoint and pdf files from the phone and can copy them and paste them into the phones file space. Once they are there, I can open and manipulate them as needed with DocsToGo and then send them as attachments via email. I have all of my email accounts routed through one account that also forwards to the phone, which means that I can do useful email work while on the road. I'm currently a Realtor and I can get to my local MLS database and "see" any listed property and even schedule a showing on-line with some of them. This is all good stuff to me.

My next challenge will be figuring out how to print a file from the phone, either over Bluedtooth or over the WIFI net. I have yet to find any printer drivers to install or haven't really even figured out what I need to do that.

There were certainly lots of moments of frustration inthe first couple of days as I figured out how to navigate to the functrions that I was trying to use or how to order and install stuff or other "learning curve" issues; however, overall I must say that I'm quite impressed with what one can do with this little wonder Droid.

[T6D16C84]

If you go into the call log and hold down on any entry for a few seconds, a menu pops up that includes "Remove from call log"

The long-press is light Androids right click, and once you get used to trying it in several places you find lots of little things you didn't know about lol

Seems to me that 90% of the questions people have involving "How do I....." can be answered by a long tap....LOL

[gardobus]

Seems to me that 90% of the questions people have involving "How do I....." can be answered by a long tap....LOL

exactly! There are all kinds of options and settings hidden by long presses lol

[MdicnMan]

Pro's: battery lasts for a longer period vs the imagio I returned to get the moto droid, also the battery recharge is very fast (last night it went from 15%-90% in about 40 minutes

Cons: keyboard is a tight for space especially along the top row of keys.
No speeddial especially for voicemail access.
No manual included, had to find on internet to download to PC
Not having a cool weather app like htc has on their phones (hopefully there will be a hack for that!)
Other than that it is a cool phone so far.

Speed dial for VM is on the bottom left of the phone screen.

[jimboman]

Tons of Pro's, and POTENTIAL.

Cons:
No way to shut off screen while charging (burn in).
Web page rendering could be improved, but load as fast as WiFi/3G allow - which is great.
Few GOOD Apps, although that will inevitably change.
No way to schedule turning on/off (great BB Feature that I miss).

Overall, quite pleased with the Droid overall, and a lot of this stuff is nitpicking.