Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Fri, 05 Nov 2010
For reasons we needn't get into, I was required to get a Droid phone, and decided on the Droid X after a too-brief introduction session with a few of the contenders.
So far, I'm not very pleased with my choice.
My biggest complaint is one that few of my contemporaries seem to share: I don't have any interest in telling Google my secrets. In this case, by "secrets" I mean my schedule, who my friends are, and what their contact details are. It seems like a basic tenet of modern life that your phone number is semi-privileged information -- would you want your phone number pasted all over the internet, as a private citizen? For most people the answer is no. So why would I willingly upload all my friends' phone numbers to a service which is dedicated to advertising, data mining and data correllation?
Same goes for my calendar, but at least there I'm only sharing my own private information, not that of all my friends. Generally speaking, though sharing your calendar with the world is a bad idea. I don't talk about upcoming events here or anywhere else online, so as to advertise as little as possible things like where to find me, or where to find my absence (such as at my house). Why would I want to share my calendar with a service which is dedicated to disseminating information far and wide, and has shown already proven to be a valuable hacking target?
The final nail in the Droid X's virtual coffin is, of course,
battery life. The least advanced cellphone I've ever owned was a
Motorola brick phone. It lasted about 8 hours on a charge, on standby.
Talk time was around an hour. Still, that was early days, and the
phone was analog-only, which is considerably less efficient than the
digital phones of today. The phone with the best battery life I ever
had was a Motorola RAZR, which would routinely go a few weeks before
beeping at me to plug in the charger. Toward the end of its life, I'd
get unhappy when I noticed that it needed charging more frequently than
once a week. My most-recent-but-one phone is an iPhone 3GS, and I was
pretty unhappy that suddenly I had to charge my phone every day or two.
You know where this is going. I've only owned the Droid X a few days now, but I've already had a battery-is-DYING panic (on day 3), at 7:30 in the evening, after unplugging from shore power at 8:30 am. Really? 11 hours (under light usage, no less)? Bullshit. So now I own a fancy retracting Micro USB cord which I'll be carrying everywhere with me like I carry my prefer-not-to-die-of-asthma inhaler. Fantastic.
Fortunately, I've found solutions for some of these problems. The contacts thing was, while very difficult to find, the simplest solution. I didn't want to upload all my iPhone's contacts to Google, and after two days of searching, I finally found a passing mention in a forum to an app called Import Contacts. Import Contacts takes a vCard file (which most contact apps will export), and imports those contacts directly to the phone, without having to involve the all-seeing eyes of Google. For 2.1 and later versions of Android, the Contacts app also includes an Import/Export option under the Settings menu, which will do the same thing (of course, it's completely undocumented, that I could find -- I only found it because the Import Contacts app said it was there). In Address Book on my Mac, I selected all the entries, and did File > Export... > Export as vCard... Done. Uploaded that .vcf file to the phone's SD card, and the import worked perfectly.
The schedule solution is not going to be as pleasing to any of my readers interested in a calendar app with a local database. I bought a Moleskine schedule book. Advantages: no batteries, can't be rendered inoperable by shocks or water damage (such as the light dunking that nearly killed my iPhone a week ago), doubles as a sketch book and way to foster vague literary pretentions. Disadvantages: can't be sync'd, and moving entries around is not as simple as cut and paste (except in a very literal way). And repeat entry options are... pretty manual.
For the battery issue, I bought a retractable USB cable. I'm usually somewhere near a computer, which is enough to give the damn phone a booster charge, and I've got a small USB-output wall-wart on the way for those times I'm not. I also turned on the Maximum Battery Savings setting on my phone, which turns off "sync" after 15 minutes of inactivity -- fine by me, the first thing I did on my iPhone was turn off any push stuff I could find (to save battery life). The Droid doesn't even have the option, you have to force the data connection to turn off.
The radios in these things are the number one killer of battery life, so anything you can do to reduce usage of the radios (by which I mean: voice/SMS radio, 3G radio, GPS receiver, WiFi radio, Bluetooth radio) will help. There's also some amount of app-killing you can do, but I'm still sorting through what I can kill off without destabilizing the phone.
I'm underwhelmed so far. The huge screen and lightning-fast processor (despite which I've already found numerous laggy points in the UI) are nothing to me if I can't use them for lack of power. Next time, Motorola, sacrifice a couple millimeters of thickness (which you can afford!) for a heftier battery. Less than 24 hours of battery life sucks ass, and if I had it to do over again, I never would have picked a Droid X. Of course, I'm stuck with my choice for now.
Posted at 09:32 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater