NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, May 2010
Circuit WriterVersion 7.3
By Jim Scheef,
Director, Danbury Area Computer Society, CT

http://www.dacs.org
jscheef (at) dacs.org (click to email author)

This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups; all other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).

Come On, Let’s Get Real
Not too long ago, I subscribed to Wired Magazine. I’ve read Wired on and off over the years and thought it would be fun to get it again, so I did a deal for Wired in exchange for a few airline miles. Naturally this was online. I have yet to receive my first issue, but I have begun to receive email marketing. The first ad was for GQ Magazine and those of you who attend the general meetings can attest that my fashion quotient is an absolute zero and I have even less interest in GQ.

This is not SPAM; I subscribed to Wired and GQ is another Condé Nast publication, so I click the link at the bottom of the email “to remove this e-mail address from future Wired e-mail promotions”. The resulting web page allows me to remove my email address, or not, from both Wired and GQ marketing. I choose both and click Submit. The confirmation is below:

Thanks! Please allow 10 business days for your subscription for Wired to be removed. Thanks! Please allow 10 business days for your subscription for GQ to be removed.

Can you believe this? Ten days! How are they updating the database? By snail mail? A one day lag I can see, but ten? And they call themselves Wired…

The Droid Does
Please forgive me if this column seems a little narcissistic, but I don’t buy a new toy every day. After a year of waiting for an iPhone that works on Verizon, the Droid has appeared instead. So I bought one. The Droid is a new smartphone to compete with the Apple iPhone. The Droid is manufactured by Motorola and is available only on Verizon.

It took four tries to get the transaction thru on the Verizon Wireless website on the Friday it was released. Because I have been off contract for several years (I saw no need to “upgrade” my old Motorola E-815 phone), I was eligible for the “New every 2” sucker deal. For the Droid this meant an additional $100 off after the $100 online discount which brought the phone down to a relatively affordable $99.99 – fifty bucks less than a refurbished 3GS and no one else’s DNA to wipe off!

The last step in the order process is the dreaded “confirm” step. After that click, the website displays a nearly blank screen with a revolving arrow thing in the middle and a message that this could take a few minutes. I let one of them run for half an hour before closing the browser window. So that evening I called Verizon to see if any of my orders had gone thru. None had, but the pleasant customer service lady said she would have the phone order people honor the online price. I suspect the phone order guy worked on commission because he was not as friendly. When he told me that I would have to pay for the overnight shipping that was free on the website, I started to enter another web order and, lo and behold, it completes right away. Sorry phone order guy.

So on Monday morning I’m headed for a client site and meet my FedEx driver at the bottom of the hill. He recognizes my car and stops to tell me he has a package for me and it requires my signature. Always be nice to your delivery people so they will be nice to you!

So why get a Droid (short for Android, the Linux-based operating system from Google) and not an iPhone? Well, only time will tell if I made the right decision but the number one reason I did not buy an iPhone 3GS when it came out is AT&T’s lousy 3G coverage in New Milford. Even the phone service has gaps. The AT&T coverage map shows only three small spots with 3G in New Milford. One is the AT&T store and I cannot figure why the other two exist but none correspond to where I live or do anything. As we discussed during AskDACS a few months back, AT&T has no 3G service on the New Milford green which you might expect to be a prime target. On the other hand, Verizon’s 3G coverage pretty much covers the state. If there is cell service, then 3G works as well. I knew this from my old phone which could use 3G services but to which I never subscribed. [Who would want to watch a movie on a 2-inch screen?]

The Droid offers features that the iPhone lacks – like a slide-out physical keyboard, replaceable battery and easily expandable memory (a 16GB microSD card is included). So is the Droid an iPhone killer? In a word – no. But it is a credible device with good support thru Google and the Android open source community. Top of the list of missing items is the multi-touch screen. You zoom in the Droid browser by touching the screen, a plus/minus thing appears and then you hit one side or the other. This is not as good by about seven miles. Also, the keyboard does not autocomplete words as you type so every word must be typed completely with the attendant opportunity for errors. Fortunately the excellent 3.7-inch 854x480 pixel screen makes it easy to see the mistakes. There is a self-proclaimed detailed comparison of the two devices on Technically Personal (tinyurl.com/yhd5mkm) and another on GadgetoPhilia (tinyurl.com/yz6zy35). Google users will appreciate the tight integration of the Droid (and probably all Android devices) with Google. Since I have not been a Googler, this is just another learning curve for me. For instance, I had to finally break down and create a Gmail account. What I will do with yet another email address remains to be seen but a Gmail account seems to be required to use the phone.

The iPhone App Store has been the key thing (in my opinion) driving iPhone sales. Android is the only other smartphone operating system with an established supply of applications and a means to deliver them – the Android Market which is run by Google. I have no idea how many apps are available (a news item says more than 10,000) but the number of iPhone apps exceeds this by an order of magnitude. Nevertheless, it took me several hours to scroll thru a few categories of just the free Android apps. By the end of the first evening playing with the Droid my scroll finger was tired and sore. During this period I learned that not all Android apps will run on all Android devices. The Droid runs the brand new version 2 of the Android OS and this alone is sufficient to cause some apps to “close unexpectedly”. To the credit of the OS, only once did a crash leave the phone in an unstable condition. Another difference from the iPhone is the ability to install apps directly to the phone. Significant hacking is required to get around Apple’s lock on applications. On the Droid, this is an option in Setup along with the ability to turn on debugging and developer tools. The only significant security block I’ve found so far is the lack of root access. This won’t last long now that the device is out. All other Android devices have been “rooted” and unlike with Apple and the iPhone there has been no attempt by Google or the manufacturers to prevent this hacking. Another plus for the Droid, in my opinion. Now that there is a higher volume Android device, I predict that the number of available apps will grow as existing iPhone apps are ported to Android and Linux developers jump on the mobile bandwagon.

Integration of my personal software tools with the Droid is coming along but I still need to carry my old and dying Windows Pocket PC PDA for contacts and calendar because I have not installed the software needed to synchronize the Droid with Exchange. That’s next once I finish this column, AskDACS and SIG notes. Another major stumbling block is passwords. I use RoboForm (roboform.com) on all of my PCs and the PDA to encrypt passwords on websites and web-managed devices like routers. I have 413 passwords in 20 folders that I will need on the Droid. More on this next month.

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