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24 Hours with the Droid (iPhone 3GS User)

For syncing music regular old Windows Media Player will do a fine job. It will sync your music to /SDCard/Music/Artist/Album which is the way I like it. It also sends over album art which the built in media player on the Droid supports.

Motorola Media Link Motorola Media Link - Motorola USA also works well on PC's if you prefer to continue using iTunes to manage your music. You just need to tell it which of your playlists you want to sync. You can choose them all, or just certain playlists. As long as your iTunes music is not DRM'd it'll transfer and play in the droid no problem. All the jazz albums I purchased on the iTunes store in the past year transferred and played fine with album art.
 
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My recent phones:

iPhone->iPhone 3G->iPhone 3Gs with a couple of BlackBerrys in there

I did not port my number over to Verizon yet. I was given a new number for testing, which I may end up keeping.

After two minutes of use, I realized why a lot of Blackberry users are getting the Droid.

My experience so far:

1. call to Verizon - Outstanding customer service, had me up an running in no time. was not a typical activation. I had to cancel the port and get a new number.

2. Set up Gmail - Google Apps Account, the integration is the best i have seen. The only thing just as good is Blackberry / Exchange integration.

3. Made a couple of calls and received one incoming. Two drops (a little concerned)

4. The Droid is outsanding, battery life seems a lot better than the iPhone 3GS. The email & calendar integration is a lot better.

5. I can hear the speaker and feel the vibration. No missed calls, txts or emails.

6. The bluetooth is usable. The quality on the iPhone was terrible.

7. Build quality seems better than the iPhone, except for the camera button.

8. The only advantage the iphone has is the iTunes integration. this makes it very simple to sync Music.

9. Call quality on the Droid smokes the iPhone, after 3 generations you think apple would have gotten it right.

10. More customization - More customization - More customization it is ridiculous that I can download an alternate Browser to the iPhone with Jailbreaking it. Apple should be ashamed of themselves.

I wish the Droid did not have a slide-out keyboard, my opinion on this may change.

My wife came home and saw the Droid and said to me "you wont keep it, the iPhone is prettier"

I think the Droid is a capable device and I am enjoying it very much. Bring on the Apps.

I will be happy to answer any other questions

You're kidding me right.... My path is 10+ yrs pocketPC/winmo up to Touch Pro then between my wife and I 30 days on the Sprint Hero & Palm Pre, then 30 days on Droid & Eris and got shafted by VZ so I ported to AT&T with the 3Gs. So far 4 days on the Iphone and as a whole it truly destroys the droid.

I really dont feel like typing pages of info because this board has proven to be just filled with guys who don't like honest opinions, but what promted me to post was your bluetooth comment. The droid and Android in particular is currently so far behind in Bluetooth that it is ridiculous.

Currently I am using sony bluetooth earbuds and they work phenomenal on the 3Gs. Yesterday as I am working in the yard and listening to the podcasts in 2x speed (more info in less time) that BTW PC itunes manages beautifully and automatically. I can stop, FF, pause RW, make voice activated calls and commands all without a bluetooth drop, interference or having to ever take it out of my pocket and touch with my soiled hands.

Try that with a droid or any current android phone, impossible.

As far as signal goes AT&T might suck in your areas but in Jacksonville FL so far I have not seen signal drop below 3 bars whereas in my particular hood Sprint, Tmo and Vz have 0-1 bar and Sprint cant make a call longer than 5 secs although with 0-1 bar I rarely would drop an Alltel/VZ call.

I thought the Eris had sufficient battery life for my wife who could take the phone off charger at 7am or so and get home by 6pm and be almost red (she is a moderate phone user and light data user, where the Pre was a little better for her, but the 3GS so far looks to last at least a full day, the 2nd day she had it she forgot to charge it overnight and she still made it through the 2nd day.

For me the 1500ma in the Hero was pretty good getting me about 10-12 hrs and I was pretty astounded at regularly getting 10-14 hours out of the droid with moderate to heavy use the 3Gs seems to be almost doubling that although it is hard to tell because I have been playing a lot og games for the first time ever on a handheld because they are pretty freaking awesome whereas all my other phones games are limited to very old console style games with poor graphics. When guys are touting Robot defense as an awesome graphics games you'll know what i mean.

Even guys on here would defend Moto's lack of .wav support, which i needed for my company voicemail system through Ring Central, but they play fine on the 3g as attachements from email, but SURPRISE there is an integrated app that manages the whole sytem and even makes voip calls through RC.

Honestly i could keep going on and on with substantiated reasons why the droid with native android does not pass muster against the iphone or even the Eris and even the eris software on the Droid HW would actually be a closer competitor but to make those statements of the droid or eris alonebeing superior overall is just not even sensical.

That being said there are things that ARE big drawbacks to the iphone. As a busioness user the iphones notification managment and lack of LED are SORELY lacking if you miss or forget an audible alert you are Fed unless you happen to turn your screen on. No way to sound profile, yes it has a nice vibration hardware switch but that is it... No incremental snoozing of todo or calendar notifications (both iphone and android have some apps that sort of make up for this but not really that well) Proprietary connector sucks, nonremovable battery sucks and no file system saving of attachments or browsing sucks.

So being a business user and depending on notifications I am hoping that the Passion/bravo will come to a reliable carrier in the next 30 days unless I continue to be blown away by the plethora of useful apps and the reliability i am continually seeing with the iphone. Although knowing that in about 4-6 months the 4G iphone should be coming out would make me antsy although resales of iphones go for better prices than any other handset....

edit

Just thought about C&P.. You try that on android, terrible. iphones cursor placement and c&p is genius. Also the new free app dragon dictate is amazing. I almost never even use they keyboard at all. Everytime i use the built in voice command app or dragon dictate it executes 100% of the time. I was lucky for google voice search to execute without a connection error at least 30-50% of the time on the droid.... although it executed almost always without error on the Hero or eris albeit much slower to launch and execute because of the ancient processor.
 
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LOL. What a long rant and the the only thing you say bad about the droid is that it can't play podcasts at 2x speed and play .wav files.

Try listening to Pandora and surfring the web on the iphone at the same time . Try reading google news with no zoom in portrait mode on the iphone. It looks like giberish, while the droid high res screen is perfectly readable. Try taking 720p video. Try playing SNES, Gameboy and Genesis games without jailbreaking (and even then you have to use crappy onscreen controlls). Try using google voice.

The iphone interface is just icons--the equivalent of the Android app drawer and a small uncustomizeable dock. How is that superior when you can customize the Droid interface 100 ways with 5 different desktop programs to make it easily as good the Eris Sense UI not to mention wigits, shortcuts, direct links to contacts, built in turn by turn navigation.

The iphone has a lot of apps. That is pretty much it's only advantage if you need some iphone app that isn't on android yet.
 
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Gatdangit, bruceo!

Hey y'all, don't get into a shouting match with bruceo. The only post this kid puts up on the forum are bash threads about how "native Android sucks a$$" or DROID's crap this or DROID craps that. Or, yeah, Sense UI!!! His incredibly biased opinion causes him to be blind to any objectivity.

The DROID isn't the perfect device, but it is incredibly good. And at this point in time, it's a great offering and the only thing that truly separates it from being an iPhone beater is lack of application support (though, not as bad as people say) and the iTunes environment. Sense UI is slick, but after a while, it's just a well executed widget skin with a few of HTC's custom apps for music and such. But not a deal breaker in my opinion.

The fact of the matter is, there's a reason why Motorola is nearing 1 million units sold. Yeah, advert hype can drive a lot of that, but only so far. It comes down to word of mouth. Yeah, I got pulled in by the ad hype and ended up loving the phone. However, the seven friends I converted bought and kept their DROID not because of the ads, but because of questions they asked me and ultimately their experience with it. You can't argue with that.

But one disgruntled user seeks to bash, troll and passes along disparaging information about the DROID. He says, "I can't scroll through 1000s of pictures quickly, so let me post a Youtube of me having trouble." Days later, another DROID owner posts up a Youtube showing him scroll through 1000s of pictures effortlessly without lag. Stuff like that is the kind of junk bruceo spouts out.

So, don't engage him in discussion because you won't get anything meaningful out of him.
 
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LOL. What a long rant and the the only thing you say bad about the droid is that it can't play podcasts at 2x speed and play .wav files.

Click my name and read my posts for the last 30 days there's plenty. Even the little I posted in this thread and the only thing you plled out was 2x podcasts and .wav try remotely skipping a track.... Droid you have to take it out of the pocket turn it on, swipe to unlock, pull down curtain click on music app then click on skip.....
 
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Try listening to Pandora and surfring the web on the iphone at the same time . Try reading google news with no zoom in portrait mode on the iphone. It looks like giberish, while the droid high res screen is perfectly readable. Try taking 720p video. Try playing SNES, Gameboy and Genesis games without jailbreaking (and even then you have to use crappy onscreen controlls). Try using google voice.

The iphone interface is just icons--the equivalent of the Android app drawer and a small uncustomizeable dock. How is that superior when you can customize the Droid interface 100 ways with 5 different desktop programs to make it easily as good the Eris Sense UI not to mention wigits, shortcuts, direct links to contacts, built in turn by turn navigation.

The iphone has a lot of apps. That is pretty much it's only advantage if you need some iphone app that isn't on android yet.

Pandora and surfing the web at the same time worked great on my iPhone 3GS (obviously jailbroken). Customization was easy because it was jailbroken (still not as good as DROID though). Google voice worked (again only because I was jailbroken), but I LOVE the way it is integrated with the normal phone usage on the DROID so I just use the phone normally and it asks me if I want to use google voice to place the call or not.

The point is the iPhone does just about everything the DROID does, the DROID just does it better and there is no "Jailbreaking" needed. Now if they just hadn't put that useless keyboard on the DROID there would be no competition.

What are the Desktop applications that you are talking about. I just got my DROID 2 days ago and am still learning all the cool things I can do with it.
 
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Gatdangit, bruceo!

Hey y'all, don't get into a shouting match with bruceo. The only post this kid puts up on the forum are bash threads about how "native Android sucks a$$" or DROID's crap this or DROID craps that. Or, yeah, Sense UI!!! His incredibly biased opinion causes him to be blind to any objectivity.

LOL what bias? You mean biased to the facts? Biased to expect that if a buyer invests into 2 years of high priced plans and expecting to buy a device that works up to expectations set by the seller. Biased to not compromising esp with a device that "deactivates compromise"

Yeah the numbers remain to be seen but are obviously good, but as i have said before there are techniques for inflating sales, which is good for the executives but at the core if things are not as sold then it is bad for the consumer and the company and I am pretty confident that the Droid if left in it's current state will be among the highest in %returned to sales. The execs just need to get sales to hold through the quarter then they'll get their bonuses. Hence the immediate drops in price and giveaways. But all just IMO only time will tell. Fortunately inthe handset business 90 days is a lifetime.
 
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Google voice worked (again only because I was jailbroken), but I LOVE the way it is integrated with the normal phone usage on the DROID so I just use the phone normally and it asks me if I want to use google voice to place the call or not.

Yes that is a HUGE plus and one of the reasons i am still leaning towards android although with 1400min family plans with calling circles or mobile to mobile on all carriers will make the novelty of free outbound calls on GV not as big a draw for most smartphone users who arent power voice callers.
 
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Dxtop open home, panda home, home++, gee, beautiful widgets
Pandora and surfing the web at the same time worked great on my iPhone 3GS (obviously jailbroken). Customization was easy because it was jailbroken (still not as good as DROID though). Google voice worked (again only because I was jailbroken), but I LOVE the way it is integrated with the normal phone usage on the DROID so I just use the phone normally and it asks me if I want to use google voice to place the call or not.

The point is the iPhone does just about everything the DROID does, the DROID just does it better and there is no "Jailbreaking" needed. Now if they just hadn't put that useless keyboard on the DROID there would be no competition.

What are the Desktop applications that you are talking about. I just got my DROID 2 days ago and am still learning all the cool things I can do with it.

Dxtop, open home, panda home, home++, gde, beautiful Widgets, etc...
 
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Yes that is a HUGE plus and one of the reasons i am still leaning towards android although with 1400min family plans with calling circles or mobile to mobile on all carriers will make the novelty of free outbound calls on GV not as big a draw for most smartphone users who arent power voice callers.

If I use google voice to make outbound calls does it not use my minutes with Verizon? I had no idea if this is true.

I use google voice because I just don't want some people to have my cell number so I can use the call screening on voice.
 
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The point is the iPhone does just about everything the DROID does, the DROID just does it better and there is no "Jailbreaking" needed. Now if they just hadn't put that useless keyboard on the DROID there would be no competition.

Thats highly subjective and could easily be turned around and added to say the but dorid doesnt do everything Iphone does.

Ive seen so many folks say well you can only do that on the iphone if you jailbreak it but from the other side of their mouth they say well we'll get that when the droid is rooted, like a decent homescreen, multitouch better browser. Or there is an app like dolphin, replacement homescreen, pinch to zoom gallery, Lock 2.0 etc, yet all of those apps are extremely buggy and not very functional esp when compared to the features they are trying to match on the iphone or even the eris/hero.

It's almost a joke IMO Its like the guy who got shafted buy the salesman and got a 20% 6 yr loan on a KIA when he could have gotten a BMW for a similar payment but he now makes up all kinds of rationlizations on why his KIA with mods is better.

Guys.. tell me what your justification is that even after the first major OTA update the homescreen still cannot scroll panels smoothly? Why cant the gpu be programmed to move the small icons across the screen without chop? but the Eris with "BLOATED" sense can move 7 screens like buttah???
 
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Click my name and read my posts for the last 30 days there's plenty. Even the little I posted in this thread and the only thing you plled out was 2x podcasts and .wav try remotely skipping a track.... Droid you have to take it out of the pocket turn it on, swipe to unlock, pull down curtain click on music app then click on skip.....


Don't feel too bad gwlaw99, the only useful thing I pulled out of that posts was that he only got 1-2 bars in his hood in Jville:thinking: What part of the Jville "hood" are you living in. I've covered every square inc of that city and would have to be in a bomb shelter somewhere to only get 1-2 bars. Now sprint I understand. I have friends that can't get 4 bars on sprint while standing next to a cell tower.. The entire time I lived there, I constantly had a better signal than my att buddies..
 
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Don't feel too bad gwlaw99, the only useful thing I pulled out of that posts was that he only got 1-2 bars in his hood in Jville:thinking: What part of the Jville "hood" are you living in. I've covered every square inc of that city and would have to be in a bomb shelter somewhere to only get 1-2 bars. Now sprint I understand. I have friends that can't get 4 bars on sprint while standing next to a cell tower.. The entire time I lived there, I constantly had a better signal than my att buddies..

I would love for you to stop by if you are in Jax to do a comparison. Just PM me.
 
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You don't like the physical keyboard? How would I play my Sega Genesis, Nintendo and Super Nintendo emulators without it? **** the haters is what I say :D

I actually liked the keyboard and made remarks how it wasnt bad coming from a touch pro which was pretty much the same just smaller. I did however find myself doing a lot of mistyping compared to the touchpro I dont know if it was ue to the way your natural handholding was altered by having to reach across the Dpad. I actually began to love the softkeyboard on the Hero with a larger screen than the touch pro and great predictive typing, which actually destroys a gimped keyboard with no prediction. Even nicer on the droid with the wider screen and nice on the iphone without the occasional long lag of the hero or eris.

The emulators arent really a compelling reason for except for momentary nostalgia because they are buggy and just dont have the play value of the incredible amount of games on iphone like call of duty and such, there really is not even a close comparison whatsoever.
 
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My wife came home and saw the Droid and said to me "you wont keep it, the iPhone is prettier"

haha my wife fought me on switching to verizon (we had been on t-mo 5 days) cause she wanted to keep her cliq because it was "cuter" than the droid. 2 hours after owning the droid, she was glad we switched. The droid (and android 2.0) are vastly superior to their android competition. I can't comment on iphone though since i have never owned one.
 
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You don't like the physical keyboard? How would I play my Sega Genesis, Nintendo and Super Nintendo emulators without it? **** the haters is what I say :D


That's exactly why i love the keyboard. I am having to learn how to play lefty however:)

To Bruceo: I haven't had too many problems with the emulators. Maybe it's because I grew up on them but I kind of prefer playing some of the old platformers and rpgs compared to some of the newer handheld games available.
 
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