Verizon Droid2 Global
OK, so I made the plunge and purchased my first ever “smart” phone. Things I noticed during the first day
As my wife and I previously had VZ Navigator on our phones, and saw that this was preinstalled on our new phones, we immediately tried out that. Apparently that app is crippleware and to unlock the full function requires an additional 10 bucks a month over and above the data plan. This prompted an angry return visit to the store where the people there calmly pointed out that what we really wanted was the Google Navigation application. Don’t get me wrong, VZ Navigator is an excellent application, but its pricing model makes no sense on a phone that has the world class Google Navigation app preinstalled and available for free.
There is a free Facebook app. Unlike the web interface which prioritizes close family and friend updates in the news feed, the app shows everybody. You also can’t see who liked a given comment. Of course, you can use the web interface and it works just fine, so I’ll just do that.
We selected the Droid2 as we felt that we would use the keyboard a lot, like we did on our previous phone. I’m finding that I’m already using the touchscreen way more than I expected to.
The browser doesn’t do SVG, but I knew that. I downloaded Firefox and verified that it does; but for now I am going to see how far I can get with the stock browser. I’m told that this will be fixed in Honeycomb. <insert snarky comment about bundling browsers with the operating system>. In any case, this is miles ahead of the browser on the LG enV3 which couldn’t even handle non-ASCII characters.
As expected, GMail works great. The only thing I have yet to figure out how to do is to mark an email as spam.
Setting up IMAP access to my other email accounts was harder than I expected. Autodetect options didn’t auto detect, even for my ISP. I could have sworn that RR had IMAP, but I may be misremembering. But I managed to muddle through it. Again, I miss Thunderbird’s Baysian filters; but at least I have SpamAssassin in the pipeline. Integration is a pleasant surprise. With my enV3, I couldn’t click on a web link. With my Droid2 I can click on a phone number.
Battery life isn’t an issue, but is something that one needs to be more conscious of, particularly with applications continuing in the background. I expect that this will quickly become second nature.
There still is plenty of exploration required. My current puzzle is exporting my security certificate so that I don’t see security warnings every time I visit my own personal website. I didn’t have the right adapter for the microSD card, so I used AndFTP instead. With that application, SCP requires a paid upgrade, but SSHCP is free. Go figure.
