Why I love my Driod

My lovely bride bought me a Motorola Droid for our anniversary.  The difference between this and my old phone is the difference between night and day.

What I hate!

First, let me tell you what I dislike about it.

• Getting to the camera takes a few seconds more than I like.  There is a camera button on the side, but I can't seem to get it to work most of the time.  While seemingly minor, this means that some of those "just happens" kinds of shots are missed fumbling. with the camera.
• The touch screen gets smudged, and makes it difficult to read.
• You can't read the screen in full daylight, it washes out badly.
• It sucks the batteries very quickly.  The more you do, the faster it goes.  A full charge is gone in less than a day.
• It gets confused at times.  I've had to take the battery out several times to force a hard reboot to clear the confusion.
• The slide out keyboard sucks in a big way.  The keys are much too small for my fingers, and I feel very cramped.  My old phone (LG ENV-3) was far superior in this manner.
• The on-screen keyboard that comes with it also sucks, for much the same reason.
• The OS has no explicit way to terminate an application, requiring the downloading of third party apps to do so. 
• Often, download of data seems very slow compared to my wife's Palm Pre (with the same service provider, same data, her phone seems faster)

But, the thing about this device is that it is so much more than just a phone. I've found that it's become an indispensable part of me.  Actually, you could turn off the phone-portion of the device, and I still would use it every day. 

It's the Apps! 

The Droid is a mobile computer with wireless Internet Access, GPS integration, a five megapixel camera, compass, and a microphone.

• Sticher Radio- is a free streaming podcast service which streams the latest of your favorite podcasts!  I listen to this all the time!
 

• Pandora - a free music streaming service that reads your mind and plays music you like.  Enter a song or a band and a custom radio channel is created just for you.
 

• PDA.Net-Allows you to use the Droid as a wireless modem.  Connect a laptop and you have wireless Internet access!

•  Ebooks-I love to read.  The Android platform has at many ebook readers which allow you to read full books on your phone!  I have used the Kindle app and Nook app (my wife has a nook.)  Both of them sycronize your library to the device, so you can start reading a book on your nook, move to the phone, then back to the nook. Laputa is an ebook reader that also provides hundreds of free ebooks from sites like Blazer.  This is an awesome app!

• Google Calendar is a wonderful thing.  I can view, add and change appointments and tasks on my calendar from the web, my phone or my desktop (I synchronize  my desktop calendar at work with a nifty app from Google.) 

• Social Integration
• Facebook -Facebook has a custom application that runs on everything (Palm Pre, Iphone, Android,etc) and it gives me real time access to my profile.
• Twitter- I can tweet and read other twits' tweets.
• Email access
• Including Gmail and Yahoo mail integration that makes accessing these accounts seamless and easy.
• Internet access
• Google voice integration

There are thousands upon thousands of applications!  Play guitar?  There's a guitar tuner app.  Always forget to feed the parking meter?  There's a Parking Alarm/ Car finder app.

Those applications are the feature that makes this integrate to my life so deeply, and they are why I love my Droid!