I switched my phone to the Motorola Droid yesterday and began fiddling around to get it working the way I want.
My previous phone was a Palm Treo 755p. I’ve had smart phones pretty much since they became available, always Palm OS. I had Sprint on a Kyocera 6035, but switched to Verizon on the 6035 for better coverage, then a Kyocera 7135, the Treo 755p, and now the Droid. My primary reason for switching was that the Treo was flaky – and it was the second one with problems. After about a year, the Treo started to intermittently reboot, lock up, microphone wouldn’t work. I’d hard-reset the thing and it still had problems. I had similar issues with the 7135. There are three main things I need on a smart phone – securable Notes, a sync to my Outlook calendar, and a decent camera. Palm has always been good with the first two, and the camera was quite good on my Treo. Unfortunately, the Droid fails in all three of my needs – at least right out of the box. Notes I can get notes on it, sort of, through the sync with Gmail. And there are some freebie applications that let you sync some Google Docs and other service notes, but they aren’t secured. I keep login and password info with me on my phone, so they need to be password protected and encrypted, and available on my Desktop and synced with the phone. I’m able to get what I need with an application called Keeper. It has secure notes on the Droid, but I had to pay $30 to get the Desktop version and sync. The sync isn’t as good as the Palm – it only works through WiFi, and has to be manually initiated on BOTH the Desktop and the Droid. The Palm was one button – push it and the sync fired off. Keeper requires that I run the Desktop version, log in, go to Sync, enter the IP address of the Droid (which won’t work when I’m VPN to the office or even AT the office on its secure WiFi connection), run the Droid version, log in, go to Sync, and turn it “On”. However, Keeper is more secure than Palm’s password protected notes. You could hack the Palm’s notes by just deleting the profile and re-syncing to a new Desktop profile. The passwords are removed and you have the data. Keeper doesn’t allow that sort of thing. When it comes to Sync, the Palm had it right – one application that everything syncs through, you hit it once and everything just works. The Droid is every application to itself – build your own sync and each one runs separately. To be fair though, the Droid expects to always be online, so sync is often not so much copying the data around but just making your online data available to you. So at least for now, my Notes situation is resolved – Callpod’s Keeper is Good Enough. Winner: It’s a tie! Palm for sync simplicity, Keeper for security. Outlook Calendar Sync Intuit is hooked on Outlook, and so, I suppose, am I. My Kyocera Palm devices included excellent Outlook sync tools. The Treo tried to make you pay extra for them, but I found that my old sync modules worked just fine with the Treo. I had a selective sync – Notes and Contacts came from Palm Desktop, and Calendar came from Outlook. I was quite disappointed to find that there wasn’t a good sync on the Droid. I’m hoping I can just get some sort of direct connection to my Intuit Exchange account a la Blackberry. What I did find, though, is a sync tool between Outlook Calendar and Gmail Calendar. AND the Droid’s calendar is essentially the native Gmail calendar, so I figured a double-sync would do it: Outlook to Gmail, Gmail to Droid. I found a freebie tool from Google called Google Calendar Sync that looked very promising. I installed it and the tool immediately began the sync. Outlook appointments started showing up in my Gmail Calendar and on my Droid. Success! Or so I thought… I had it set to sync between the two – exactly how it worked with my Palm – but it’s missing some appointments and I can’t figure out why – seems random. I changed it to Desktop overwrites and synced again. I opened one of the appointments that didn’t get into Gmail Calendar, changed the description, saved it and synced again. Still no luck. Most of my appointments show up, but not all of them. One peeve with the Droid is that when you go to look at appointments, it always starts the display for a day in the same place – about 2pm, even if the current time is 9am. That means appointments before 2pm don’t show up unless you scroll. The Palm was smart enough to know it was 9am, or 2pm, and it automatically scrolled to the appropriate (next or current) appointment. I’ll have to go through and check which ones are missing to make certain I’m reminded of all my appointments – not just the ones the sync tool decided I should know about! Winner: Palm for accurate sync and display Camera So it’s looking like my choice to switch to the Droid wasn’t the best one I’ve ever made, but I definitely had to do something as my Treo was practically unusable. Unfortunately, so is the camera on my Droid. I was excited to get what sounded like a great camera – 5 megapixel and a flash. I think… that I have a bad unit. I’ll be taking it in to a Verizon store later and comparing it with a store Droid demo or something, because the pictures it is taking are completely unusable. Colors are messed up – it looks like a 16 color GIF or something! My settings are all default – no special color effects (which you can do on a Droid). But the pictures are totally lousy. Check out the photo below – my TV with some ceiling in the shot shows the wacky color problems.
Sending a picture is a little different – the Palm always sent via Messaging, with a sort of unified way of selecting the recipient. With the Droid, you first have to choose your way of sending. Let me explain… with the Palm, I can take a shot, click the Envelope icon, and start typing a contact name. Then I’d get a drop down of addresses – both phone numbers and emails. With the Droid, I first have to select Messaging (where I can send only to phone numbers unless I manually type in an email address) or Gmail (where I can only send to email addresses, but they can come from my Contacts). It’s better in one way – sending via Gmail doesn’t compress the picture to Messaging limitations. Winner: Palm… pending getting a fixed camera on the Droid, and assuming I’ve got a bad one. I’ve owned some development tools for the Palm for quite some time, and I am able to create my own applications. I’m currently downloading and installing the Android development tools, so we’ll see how that goes. It’s certainly easier to install applications on the Droid. There’s practically no manual included with the Droid, just a small booklet. You have to very closely look at any dialogs you see on the Droid in order to know how to do things – OR keep your Desktop computer close by (like I did) so you can do fast an easy searches to find answers. Yeah, you can do that on the Droid, but it’s a much slower process. I really like the Google Maps Navigation on the Droid – it’s A-GPS, not a true GPS receiver, but it depends on its connection with a Carrier to help determine where it is. So if you are out of coverage range, it isn’t going to work. But for most driving around, it’s great. It nailed exactly where I am in my house, and even includes my long, 4/10ths of a mile gravel driveway as a “road” in its directions. The voice commands are decent, but it’s foolish to require touchscreen interactions for voice actions. For instance, I have to 1) Press the Voice Call button, 2) Speak, e.g. “Call home”, 3) Push the OK button to confirm. I should be able to say “Wake up”, “Call home”, “Yes”. What’s really disappointing is that, well, it’s 10+ years since the release of the first smart phones. It’s been 20+ years since we’ve had the Palm. Sync has been solved. Voice commands have been solved. Here at Intuit Labs, we have some design philosophies that we try to follow. When you have a new product with delightful features, e.g. Google Maps Navigation or simple App installation, it isn’t enough to get those done really well to give a great customer experience. There are also features that people simply expect to work well – like sync, voice commands and cameras. If you don’t get those right, it doesn’t really matter if your new device can sing, dance and do your taxes. Get the basics done right, get the minimum viable right before you try to delight me. I anticipate doing some development work to get this thing working the way I REALLY want it to work.
