HTC Incredible

I got a HTC Incredible about a month ago.  Right away some of the issues that I had with the Droid are taken care of.  In case you don't remember here are some of problems I posted about;

• Droid didn't copy and past from email.
• The Incredible has two mail clients.  One of them is called "Gmail" and I think it comes with the android os.  The other one is simply "Mail" and it supports a long press to zoom and copy.  It takes a bit to get used to, but it works.  
• I didn't like the swipe to answer.
• The Incredible brings up two buttons which you tap.  This can be done with one hand if you are careful.
• I wasn't impressed with the battery life.
• Unfortunately the Incredible doesn't help much with this.  It seems a little worse.
• I thought that the battery cover came off way too easily.
• The Incredible battery cover is much harder to get off.  The first time I did it I had to look at the instructions again to make sure I wasn't breaking the phone.

So, it looks like HTC read my blog.  I'm flattered, but I can't take credit for all of it.  They came up with some other improvement like:

• Flash. No not the comic book kind. Flash video.  Try that on your iphone.
• Multiple home screens.  I think this is also part of the Nexus one, but it's an improvement over the Droid.
• The nifty clock thing.  OK I know it's an app, but I kind of like it.  When you first open the phone it plays an animation to represent the current weather.
• The camera is an 8 megapixel which is nice.

If you are still reading my blog, HTC, I like what you are doing.  Here are the things that I would improve.

• I would make the dual camera set up with the forward facing camera like you have on the EVO standard.
• I would look at increasing the battery size.  I've seen the battery and I believe that doubling the size would be worth it for me if it doubled the the time.  
• I've felt the heat coming off the phone when it's running the gps so I realize that this may be more of a heat
• As long as I'm looking at stuff I would look into solar paint.  If it's sturdy enough I could imagine painting this stuff on the outside of the phone and/or the outside of a belt clip phone case to charge the phone all the time.

If you are in the market for a phone you have to consider coverage area (not to mention price).  If Sprint's coverage area is suitable for your needs I would go with the EVO (which looks like the Incredible with a front facing camera).  Otherwise I would go with the Incredible over the Droid.  

Scientists create cell based on man-made genetic instructions

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/20/AR2010052003336.html

On one hand this brings to mind all the sci-fi movies ever made and adds about two levels of creepy.  If I understand this right they built the DNA for this from scratch.  Sure its a copy of existing DNA, but how long till they start experimenting?  It just sounds scary.

On the other hand, this might not be so bad.  As scary as it sounds the article mentions other experiments that are going on.  Also, note how they are calling a dividing cell life and naming the species.  That makes it hard to turn around and call a newly conceived human anything but a living human.

Cell phones and GPS

Sorry about not posting for a while.  If you know me you know that there are times that I don’t have a lot to say.  In the description part I mention that I got tired of registering with different websites to comment on stuff so I started a blog.  Lately the news has been covered over with coverage of Haiti, and I really don’t have a lot to say about that.  I’m not saying that there isn’t anything to say about it.  I’m saying that I’m not the one to talk about the place because I’ve never been there.  The best I can do for those people is to pray for them.  I am doing that, and I hope you are to. 

I’ll try to stick to things that I think I understand.  If I’m wrong about something I trust that someone will comment on it.  I have enabled moderation on the comments, but I just want to keep the blog clean.  If you comment using non-military grade language I’ll post it even if you disagree with me.  I know all three of my followers and I don’t think that you will be posting anything bad, but the blog itself could be read and commented on by anyone in the world.  So far all the feedback that I have gotten has been positive.  I’ll take that to mean that the whole world agrees with me ;-)

Anyway, I saw this article about Nokia giving away navigation software.  I know a little about navigation systems.  In the Army we had the boxes that would give us the grid coordinates of our current position sometimes down to one meter accuracy.  They still taught us land navigation by compass and map because not everyone was issued a GPS and batteries can die.  I had a car with factory GPS installed.  I own a tom-tom.  I also own a droid.  So I’ve experienced navigation from compass to cell phone.

Nokia’s move here should not come as a surprise to anyone.  I would be surprised if Apple didn’t make the same move.  The way I see it the cell phone is where the GPS unit belongs.  The in car navigation was stunk.  The GPS unit itself was probably pretty good, but the maps weren’t updated.  With a cell phone you can easily download updates. 

Also it’s not going to be long till someone figures out that you could have the cell phone update a centralized map with routes taken and travel times so that you could have maps that update themselves with new roads and such automatically.  All they would have to do is assume that say 500 phones traveling along a path between 15 and 100mph means that they are on a road or railroad and bounce that off of railway maps to make sure that you are looking at a road.  You may have to add some time constraint to keep the people who drive ATVs and motorcycles off road from making a road on your map, but this isn’t too hard to do.

This would give you the ability to account for traffic patterns when your program looks for routes to take to your destination.  You could also have the cell phone send up an alert when it is traveling at a slower than expected speed.  Then the central map could kick out a detour for all the other phones using their software to avoid the slowdown.

Tom-Tom could do this if they included some way for their units to call home.  I bought a cheap model so it’s possible that they have this without me knowing about it.  The problem with this is that at some point the cell phone carriers will realize that people might not want a smart phone if the already have a Tom-Tom which would make Tom-Tom a competitor.  You don’t see businesses playing nice with their competition so Tom-Tom’s data plan is likely to go up.  Same thing applies with any other manufacturer of stand alone GPS units.  The only to deal with this would be for the GPS maker to come out with a way to tether off a less smart phone.  If they can’t do this the stand alone GPS will be almost dead.  There will still be a market for the ruggedized ones among hikers, hunters, and such.  That’s the way I see it.

Seperating Droid contacts

Some people enjoy turkey for Christmas.  However, I am eating crow this year.  If you remember in an earlier post I complained about not having a setting to choose whether or not the contacts were together.  I found that if you edit the contact and then hit the menu you have an option to separate the contacts.

I kinda feel like this.

Google

I just saw this article about yet another new phone, but this one is from Google.  I'm not really salivating over this like the article says.  I think the article itself is propaganda, I think the "leaks" are just marketing, and I think that the phone will be one an HTC phone that Google has spiced up a bit and then branded. 

I do like the idea of the phone being unlocked to begin with, but I'm not sure that it will sell.  Most of the time people buy their phones through the carriers by entering into a contract with the carrier.  I’m not sure that the carriers will buy into the menu idea and still subsidize an unlocked phone. 

On a larger scale I’m intrigued at the things that Google is doing as a company.  At first Google was just a search engine/marketing company.  Now they are doing web browsers, cell phone operating systems, maps, email, corporate email, productivity software, and operating systems.  The article that I started with begins by saying “Watch out Apple”, but it looks more like it should be watch out Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell and anyone else in the technology sector.  I included Dell because after Google got android on phones they are contracting to make their own phones.  It’s not a big leap to think that they would do the same thing with Chromium.  I like these developments.  I would like to log in to Google Apps someday and take care of problems that happen on one of my branches Google computers that are running Chromium, or have someone in the company able to coordinate service using Google latitude that was deployed to our android phones. 

I’m concerned that they wont be able to pull it off.  I’m not questioning their technical skills.  I just think that as a company Google will not be able to focus on doing these other things well and maintain their focus on doing search.  I hope I’m wrong in this.

The Droid adventure continues

Yesterday I posted about a problem I had with the Droid voice search.  I have fixed the problem.  Well, I think I fixed the problem.  When I posted the problem on this blog I also posted a complaint on the Motorola support forum.  Doing this required me to register which in turn required the serial number of my phone.  So it is possible that one of the techs at the support group reached out and fixed something over the air, but they haven't taken credit for doing it.  I handle some of the helpdesk calls at work and I take credit for fixing stuff if they call me.  I do this even if I didn't do anything to fix the problem because I will get the blame for the computer not working even if I didn't mess it up.  So I think I fixed the problem.

Here is what I did:
First I exported all of my contacts from Outlook.  I have multiple email addresses, and almost all of my contacts are in Outlook.

Next I imported them to Gmail.

Then I went into settings > Privacy> factory data reset.  I had to reactivate the phone.  When I did I only told it about my gmail account.

Then I called someone.

Then I joined the phone to one of my other accounts and tested the phone call again.

Here's what I think the issue was:

I think that the phone does not look at Exchange contacts in the same way as it looks at Gmail contacts.  The first time I tried the voice dial thing I tried to call someone who was not on the Gmail contact list.  Somehow this confused it and it got stuck searching the web instead of looking at the contacts.

I didn't spend as much time as usual trying to get my thoughts into coherent words this time.  I apologize for this.  I just wanted to get this fix posted.

More on the Droid

I should have just put all my findings in one blog.  I wasn’t thinking about how separating the different complaints would look.  Sorry about that. 

I have the car dock.  This makes the phone answering and speaker thing even more annoying because the phone knows it’s in a car dock, but still wants me to swipe to answer, and it wants to send the conversation to the regular phone instead of the speaker.  I think that Motorola makes Bluetooth kits which would explain this problem.  The other problem that I have in the car dock it that the voice dial does not work.  A co-worker also has the droid.  On his phone the voice dial works.  When you press the search button you can say “Call” and the phone part comes up to ask you who to call.  On mine doing the same thing results in a Google search for the word “call”. 

Yet, periodically it gives me this message to mock me.

I told my Verizon rep that this does not work.  I think it's been three weeks now, and I haven't heard anything from him.  Apparently he doesn't work either.  I'm not the only one with the problem.  You might notice my post on the Motorola site.  If you are about to buy a Droid make sure that you test this before you walk out the door since some of the phones work and others don't.

I have posted a lot of complaints about the Droid, and if you will bear with me I should be able to finish up (unless I find something else).

I like the combined inbox.  I have more than one email account, and it's easier to check them all in one place.  They tried to combine the contacts some as well and messed it up a bit for me.  My father's nickname is Mike.  His name is Roy, but everyone has always called him Mike.  My father's father and his father before him were named Roy.  My grandmother started calling my father Mike to lessen the confusion.  The nickname stuck and it is my actual name.  Thus like my father I can be called Mike, but I don't have the jr after my name.  Instead of calling me Roy to really confuse people I have always been Michael and my father is Mike.

"Neat story, but what does it have to do with your phone" you say?  Well, since I assumed you said that I'll tell you.  When the phone imported my contacts from the Exchange server it saw Mike and Michael with the same last name and assumed that they were the same person.  This wouldn't be a big deal except that there is no setting that I can find to tell the phone to treat the two as different.

Another thing I noticed is with the lattitude part of the maps.  It seems to almost work.  By that I mean that someone who I have shared my location with can get my last updated location, but the updates seem to be sporadic, and I can't find any setting that will allow me to change how often this update get's sent.

This leads in to the feeling that I have gotten throughout dealing with the phone that there are settings beyond my reach.  I don't really want to have to adjust everything on the phone, but I do want to be able to.  I feel like I could fix some of these things on my own if there was a setting to change.

Droid battery

I'm tempted to create a new blog and name it "Mike's Gripes". Keep in mind what I said at the beginning about how I liked the phone in general. There are plenty of good things about the phone that the marketing departments of Verison and Morotola should be letting you know about. I feel that since they are already bringing you all the good stuff it is more valuable to hear the things that they wont be telling you.

For instance, the battery is not as good as I would like. Seems like all that neat stuff that it does takes power. I opened the battery cover on my phone (don't do this with yours) and took the battery out to get an idea of the size and weight of the battery. The weight is barely noticable, and it's fairly thin. It's thin and light enough that doubling the size would not cause me any grief.

Above I mentioned that you shouldn't open your battery door. The problem that I have come accross with it is that it comes off more easily than I want. I hesitated bringing this up because I realize that there's a balance between comming off at a slight breeze and needing a cutting torch to change the battery. What I want is to be able to get the battery cover to open when I want to while not having it fall off the phone as a result of getting out of the car (which happened last night). The cynical side of me wonders if this is not a feature designed to sell after market replacement battery covers. I tend to doubt this though since you can prevent the cover from coming off by putting some duck tape on the cover right over the Motorola, Google and Verizon logos. While you have the duck tape out you can go ahead and make a case for the phone (I'm never buying a cell phone case again). 

Droid

At the risk of seeming like a grouch I'll go on about what I don't like about the Droid.  The swipe to answer thing is neat to look at.  There are a couple of problems with it though.  First of all it takes some getting used to.  My wife who also has one has swiped the wrong way several times.  This turns the sound off so that the next call does not ring.  


This isn't a big problem.  This is just something to get used to.  The problem comes when you are driving.  I don't have a Bluetooth hands free set up in my car.  That means that answering the phone requires me to swipe the phone and then somehow put it on speaker while not crashing.  


The reason this bothers me is that it would be easy to fix.  The phone has a gps.  It wouldn't be that hard for a piece of software to look at the current speed and change this behavior if say the speed was greater than ten miles per hour.  Then you could give the user two big buttons and send the call to speaker if the user decides to answer.    This wouldn't be that bothersome for a passenger and it might just prevent an accident.

           

  

Droid copy and paste

I got a droid a little while back. This is strange for me as I usually don't go out and get the newest toys to come out. Instead, I tend to wait til the price comes down and the bugs get worked out. This time, however, I went ahead and took the plunge.

Overall I like the phone. There are some things that I don't like about it though. These have not been critical for me, but they might cause problems for others. Rather than create one long post with all the problems so far I intend to create multiple posts to break it up a bit.


First of all, I tried to copy some text from an email. I can't find a way to do it. I was trying to fix another problem and got tired of having to manually enter a password on one of my accounts because the characters are hard to get to on the droid keyboard. The Blackberry I had before could do this. Why wouldn't a droid?

Google changes the world

Just noticed this.  Apparently, there are more than 7 continents.  Go to Google maps and select terain view and zoom all the way out to see what I mean.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1

Just read this and had to make a comment.

Dave, Microsoft’s marketing department called and wants to know where to send the check.

Seriously, you have to be kidding. You really think we should forget about Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and both versions of the Xbox. All of these products required fixes of some type. The lesson that comes from this is “Microsoft products are in beta until SP1”. ME and Vista never really worked at all.

Your reasoning that the fixes are the only thing that comes into play doesn’t make sense. Murphy’s law ensures that your setup will be the one that has the problem requiring the fix. You might even be the first one with that problem which means that they or you will have to come up with a work around. If you want to do that have fun with it. As for myself and our company we will wait till SP1.