Phone Droid

The Motorola phone Droid continues to perform well. My previous post discussed ordering the incredible and receiving the Motorola phone Droid instead. It was actually a happy accident as the 1st generation phone droid is a sweet piece of hardware. A few things I noticed right out of the box was the speed at which the Android 2.1 OS performed as well as the browsing capabilities. The Droid has the flexibility to go 3G cellular, wifi, and bluetooth and it runs extremely fast in wifi range. The other not so obvious capability was the Google voice to text app for searching local data on the phone or external data on the Internet. The accuracy of the application even with complicated words was certainly more than I expected. The GPS locator and Navigation application completely blew my mind. All I could think of was the market share Garmin and other product central companies would suffer with this new Droid feature. Lastly, The 5 megapixel camera boasts significant resolution and has a toggle switch to go right into DVD quality video recording (720×480 resolution) up to 24 fps capture; up to 30 fps playback. Don’t forget to check out Handbrake for your video conversion needs and load up your Droid with cool video.

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4 great tips to get you up and running on the Droid:

1. Droid outlook Sync

Blackberry users wondering how to sync their phone Droid with outlook and preserve all the outlook features like tasks, notes, calender, contacts should test out the DejaOffice app by companion link. You can get a 14-day trial to see if the app is a fit before spending the $39.00 to buy it. Download the USB product version from the companion link site and then download the DejaOffice app on your actually droid phone from Android marketplace. This has been an absolute life-save migrating years of outlook data to an opensource phone like Droid. The really beautiful feature is Dejaoffice will place contacts and calender events into the default “contact” and “calender” apps which also keeps your Google calender up to date. Having the Google Calender up to date is nice if you forgot your Droid and were on another computer.

2. General Email on Droid

If you’re an avid Gmail user and do not use outlook then the previous tip may be useless for you. In addition, you may be perfectly happy with the default email program provided by Google on the Droid and life is good. For the rest of us, we will need to make a few more adjustments to how email is handled. If you stay with the default program do not expect the solid and reliable “push” technology that blackberry provides. The default email program will pull emails when you have the application loaded (less than desirable). You may also find that you are not getting all the emails on your phone droid, especially if you have an office computer fighting for the same emails. Both of these solutions can be fixed easily. For a more robust email client download the K9 email app for free. This will simulate the push technology the blackberry has and give proper notification in the Droid task bar. It is not quigo into your options menu on your email desktop client (outlook, mozilla thuderbird, entourage) and verify you are leaving a copy on the server.

3. Reboot the Droid

This seems basic I’m sure, but rebooting is a healthy thing when the Droid is on the fritz or having bloat from multi-tasking too many apps. Alt-shift-del. You can also hold the power button for about 3 seconds and power down the Droid.

4. Task Manager App

This free little app will save you a lot of headache and battery life when you have too many apps open at once. The multi-tasking ability of the Motorola phone Droid is definitely a strength, but also a weakness if don’t wrangle your open applications. This app will allow you to deep-six everything at once except that few essential programs you may want to keep open. Again, this is critical for a getting a full day of productivity from the battery on the Droid.