First, I love my new Droid and it has many great features. But after 4 days with my beastie, I have two items which I think need some improvement.
#1: Battery usage. My problem with the battery usage is perhaps mostly my fault, but it is hard to understand what the current rate of battery consumption is and what specifically is draining the battery. For example, last night, I put the unit on the nightstand next to bed after playing some Sudoku for maybe 20 minutes. I had fully charged it before this and it was already reading about 80% charge when I pressed the power button to put it into standby. When I woke up about 7 hours later, I turned the unit on and it read only 20% battery charge! Apparently, my Twitter app (Swift) had been running all night according to the battery usage app. What I would like is to be able to quickly and easily put the unit into a well understood config, say for example: Phone only mode or Phone and e-mail only mode. I'd hate to be far from my charger and discover that my unit had eaten up all the battery charge by accidently being left in the wrong state. I'd also like to learn more about what features in the Droid uses how much charge.
#2: I'm in a somewhat remote location (ok, at an Observatory on a mountain about 50 miles from town). We have poor cell coverage up here and spotty slow data network coverage. I've been able to get 1X coverage occasionally enough to refresh twitter pages or facebook pages or the occasional webpage or app download. My cell coverage runs anywhere from 0 to 3 bars. However, even with 2 or 3 bars, when I try to make a call, it appears to do little after saying "dialing" until after a short period, it times out and says "call has been lost". It's a bit frustrating to see what appears to be enough bars to make a call, but failure anyway. I'm probably expecting too much to get coverage here, but it seems like the Droid is teasing me with a few bars when it really should say that it has none.
Anyway, like I said, I really like my Droid, I'd just like to understand these two questions a bit better.
Jim.
#1: Battery usage. My problem with the battery usage is perhaps mostly my fault, but it is hard to understand what the current rate of battery consumption is and what specifically is draining the battery. For example, last night, I put the unit on the nightstand next to bed after playing some Sudoku for maybe 20 minutes. I had fully charged it before this and it was already reading about 80% charge when I pressed the power button to put it into standby. When I woke up about 7 hours later, I turned the unit on and it read only 20% battery charge! Apparently, my Twitter app (Swift) had been running all night according to the battery usage app. What I would like is to be able to quickly and easily put the unit into a well understood config, say for example: Phone only mode or Phone and e-mail only mode. I'd hate to be far from my charger and discover that my unit had eaten up all the battery charge by accidently being left in the wrong state. I'd also like to learn more about what features in the Droid uses how much charge.
#2: I'm in a somewhat remote location (ok, at an Observatory on a mountain about 50 miles from town). We have poor cell coverage up here and spotty slow data network coverage. I've been able to get 1X coverage occasionally enough to refresh twitter pages or facebook pages or the occasional webpage or app download. My cell coverage runs anywhere from 0 to 3 bars. However, even with 2 or 3 bars, when I try to make a call, it appears to do little after saying "dialing" until after a short period, it times out and says "call has been lost". It's a bit frustrating to see what appears to be enough bars to make a call, but failure anyway. I'm probably expecting too much to get coverage here, but it seems like the Droid is teasing me with a few bars when it really should say that it has none.
Anyway, like I said, I really like my Droid, I'd just like to understand these two questions a bit better.
Jim.
But with 6-programs running, 4 email accounts checking email all night, i still had about 85% battery in the morning.
