SmartphoneSmarts

If you happen to have a Pandora, you can go to settings and turn on High Quality audio. I'm not sure what the bitrate is, but it sounds pretty good and seems to support stereo audio.

Posted by Bryant at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you happen to have line-in support in your car. You should plug it in your car if you want to have a nice speakerphone.

Unlike other devices that turn off the device microphone if headsets are plugged in, the Droid leaves its microphone on. This in effect allows you to answer calls for you through your car's speaker system.

Posted by Bryant at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know there are about a million and a half Droid reviews already out there, but all of them were too general. Many of them just covered the feature set, but didn't really go into how the phone works in day to day life.

That being said, let's begin at the top. Today I purchased a smartphone that has:
- A Full QWERTY Keyboard
- 16GB Expandable/Removable Memory
- 5MP Camera with Flash and autofocus
- 3.7" 480 x 854pixel Capacitive Multi-touch Display
- 1400 mAh User Replaceable Lithium Ion Battery
- CDMA/EVDO/WIFI/Bluetooth/GPS radios
- Magenetic Compass, Accelerometer, Ambient Light Sensor
- 116 x 60 x 14 mm
- 170 grams

Continue reading "Motorola Droid / Android 2.0 Review" »

Posted by Bryant at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm in line right now for my Droid.

And by in line, I mean in my warm car. It's 38 degrees this chilly morning and my local verizon wireless store was kind enough to hand out tickets to people as they came so that they could wait in their cars.

While I'm kind of disappointed there isnt a line of 200 here yet, It's also nice knowing I only had to get here about 45 minutes early and I'm 7th in line.

People are slowly trickling in and it looks liek there are about 15 people in line with 15 minutes to go.

So after a love/hate relationship with windows mobile since 2005. This is it.

I'll try to post my thoughts later.

Posted by Bryant at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm planning on pulling out the old sleeping bag Thursday and hopping in line for the Motorola Droid release this Friday at 7AM. Although I haven't had a chance to play with the phone yet, I'm pretty excited based on what I've seen thus far. The reason why I'm excited is that it looks like it has a pretty decent chance at being a phone that can actually be usable for work. With its large screen, full hardware keyboard and multi-tasking.

However, we have a pretty strict corporate policy on our Exchange server at work. Our devices are supposed to support Remote Wipe and a pin password requirement, etc. I haven't seen any reviews online that have covered this scenario yet. So I had the idea today to download the Android 2.0 SDK Emulator.

After downloading and installing, I set up my exchange account settings. This seems to work very well. I can view all my outlook folders, my contacts are synced, and I'm allowed to sync up to a month of old email

Differences from Windows mobile I can tell so far:
- I can't search the company contacts directory
- I can't verify signed emails
- I can't send signed emails
- I can't read encrypted emails
- It doesn't seem to require me to put on a password policy on my phone

The default sdk image doesn't include the corporate calendar, so I haven't been able to test that out yet.

Overall, It seems as though I will be able to get 90% of the functionality, and 100% of the functionality I use on a day to day basis.

Again, I tested this so I could anticipate how my DROID will act, but I did not test this on any actual hardware and/or deployed software so actual mileage may vary.

Posted by Bryant at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So I've been a good citizen and have switched my Q to flight mode when on an airplane. However, about a month ago when i did this, I still received a text message while in flight mode. I thought this was weird and thought it might be a glitch and something do do with the broadcast nature of text messages.

However, this morning, after I landed in Chicago from Washington DC, first I received voicemail notification and then I had an incoming call. I was completely perplexed as I saw my signal strength indicator had an X through it. I thought maybe even if I answered the call, it would not go through, but the phone call went on as normal.

The way I believe cell towers works is that in order to have received that phone call today, my phone had to have registered on the cell tower first with an outgoing ping in order to receive the phone call. In this case, the "flight mode" on the phone might not be cutting off the radio but maybe just reducing the transmitting power? Either that or flight mode is a complete farce to keep stewardesses happy.

Posted by Bryant at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (98)

A couple of years back when I first moved to the DC area I decided to invest in GPS for my car. Before, I used to think of GPS as a toy or as some un-necessary luxury, but now after my stereo and maybe my speedometer, it's probably the most used device in my car.

However, there are a few drawbacks to my in-vehicle unit. The first and major issue is that the device is permanently installed in my car. Therefore, when I am on vacation or in someone elses car or even walking I am without navigation. Next, the system is CD based, this means that data is spread out across several discs split by region and the data gets old.

Now that I have a smartphone with a fairly strong processor, a good amount of storage and bluetooth, I've decided to try and find a replacement.

Continue reading "Wayfinder Review" »

Posted by Bryant at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (719)