FInally got one

[fishacura]

Finally entered the "new age" (which is old now I admit) and got a droid 3. Moving from a blackberry (hated it!) and decided not to go down the "sell your soul to Steve Jobs" apple route so droid it is. Like it so far. I have A LOT to learn but have been lurking here a bit and am sure I will have questions for many of you. Thanks in advance for all the help lol!!!

[lotzakritters]

Finally entered the "new age" (which is old now I admit) and got a droid 3. Moving from a blackberry (hated it!) and decided not to go down the "sell your soul to Steve Jobs" apple route so droid it is. Like it so far. I have A LOT to learn but have been lurking here a bit and am sure I will have questions for many of you. Thanks in advance for all the help lol!!!

Welcome. I to came from the world of blackberry. Best thing I could have ever done. You made the right choice.

Sent from my Rooted Droid3 using Tapatalk

[BleedingPurist]

Finally entered the "new age" (which is old now I admit) and got a droid 3. Moving from a blackberry (hated it!) and decided not to go down the "sell your soul to Steve Jobs" apple route so droid it is. Like it so far. I have A LOT to learn but have been lurking here a bit and am sure I will have questions for many of you. Thanks in advance for all the help lol!!!

Welcome! I came from an iPhone 3G to the original Droid and then most recently Droid 3. Rule #1, don't use a task killer and if you read about anyone using one here, know that they are an idiot. The task killer is a mistaken holdover from the early days of Android when it was on the G1 on Tmobile.

I love my Droid 3 more than any other phone I've had, including my rooted, overclocked, original Droid.

[fishacura]

Not even sure what a task killer is lol (seriously...no idea).

I do know that I am not going to root anything for a long time until I really master just regular usage of the phone.

Possible uses in the future I could see for rooting might be:

1. using the sd card slot (not sure if VZ has this locked or not)
2. turning off annoying background apps that are drawing battery
3. Using as wifi hot spot (but someone here posted you can use the "radio" as a hotspot without rooting but not sure what that means yet)

Other than that, not sure if I will go that route

BTW, most of my usage will be at home and I have a home wireless network. If I use my wifi to connect to my home network instead of using Verizon's network, does that still cound against my data usage?

[ajgates92]

I do know that I am not going to root anything for a long time until I really master just regular usage of the phone.

That's what they all say...until the new ROMs come out!

[BleedingPurist]

A task killer is an app that will let you kill a running task. Only rarely should the need arise to force an app to close because it has frozen up or stopped responding.. and you can do that through the built in settings under Manage Applications. Let Android handle it.

I am like you. I didn't root my original Droid right away because I wanted to just enjoy it as released before I started messing with it. You may not need or want to root. The only reason I did my original Droid was it really did need the speed boost. That is not the case here. The only reason I'd root Droid 3 is to get the locked bookmarks off and uninstall the VCast Apps. Otherwise, unless Ice Cream comes out and they are delaying it for Droid 3 where is available for rooted D3s, I'll leave it alone.

The SD Card slot? Do you mean the Sim Card? The SD Card slot is completely open to you so you can add up to 32 Gigs. I just took my 16 gig card from my original Droid and put it in. So it reads like you have two storage cards, internal and external.

No, it doesn't count against you when you use Wifi. That is pretty much the point of it other than the possible speed increase. You only incur data usage using 3G.

Using Wifi as a hotspot on a rooted phone is the excuse Verizon and ATT are giving to created tiered data usage.

Finally, there really shouldn't be any of the "annoying background apps" just running unless you've run them. Some people have gone into unnecessary hysterics over something that doesn't exist here so they start trying to kill processes that are needed and then wonder why their battery just drains away.

[BleedingPurist]

That's what they all say...until the new ROMs come out!

Dealing with ROMs was actually a pain in the ass on my original Droid. Constantly having to reinstall apps and get my phone set up back to where I want it was not fun. Dealing with bugs and quirks... like many of them thought it was such a great idea to have pushing the camera button trigger something like the music player. Just wonderful when it's in my pocket going off randomly. Most Roms were all about ridiculous themes and and stupid modded ideas. All I wanted was pure Gingerbread or whatever it was at the time that was the latest iteration of pure Android. Only a small number of them actually did that. The rest had their own ideas about how much better (read as "utter sh**") they could make it.

I've really been liking the fact that my phone has retained all info for this long of a period.

[fishacura]

Using Wifi as a hotspot on a rooted phone is the excuse Verizon and ATT are giving to created tiered data usage.

Finally,

Someone mentioned there are 2 ways to use the phone as a hotspot. One is "tethering" which uses data or requires an extra service or something like that. The other was via the "radio"...not sure I am using the right term here but there was a 2nd way that still used data but didn't require any extra service of any sort.

Anyway, is there a simple way to use the phone as a wifi hotspot for a non techie without paying for anything other than data use.

[BleedingPurist]

Someone mentioned there are 2 ways to use the phone as a hotspot. One is "tethering" which uses data or requires an extra service or something like that. The other was via the "radio"...not sure I am using the right term here but there was a 2nd way that still used data but didn't require any extra service of any sort.

Anyway, is there a simple way to use the phone as a wifi hotspot for a non techie without paying for anything other than data use.

I honestly don't know until the day comes the service providers stop trying to triple dip or more into getting paid for data service as well as trying to go back to the 90's on amount of data usage.

Regulation.. lots and lots of it, needs to come back into play.

[Fr33dom]

It should be said that root by itself will not change the behavior of your phone one bit though what you do with root may. I just like to keep the terms straight for the new folk.

On the tethering, once you have root, you can tether without the need to plug your USB cable into a computer. Until then and without an overly expensive plan from the provider, you need to use something like PDAnet which generally needs a driver installed on your computer and a USB connection to it.

The reference to radio is bound to confuse because there are several radios in the phone--Bluetooth, WIFI, 3g (or CDDMA?) to name the ones I am somewhat sure of.