New DROID ads show off Android, will make a man out of you


“A robot is a thing that does…” Verizon / Google / Motorola are taking their ad onslaught to new heights and in a new direction, with three new ads (which will hit “soon,” according to our tipster), two of which actually show off Android functionality. It’s a bold new vision for a hyperbole-filled, guytastic campaign which shows no sign of letting up, and seems more than anything to be the complete antithesis to Palm’s coma-inducing spots instead of an antidote for Apple’s everyhipster sensibilities. Check out the three new DROID ads after the break.

[Thanks, DroidDoesItAll]

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New DROID ads show off Android, will make a man out of you originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Photoshop for Android Phones Now Available

android-shop

Photoshop.com, the mini photo-editing application from Adobe, is now available for Android phones. The app has been available to U.S. iPhone owners for about a month, but now Google-phoners can grab it from the Android Marketplace.

The free app offers almost the exact same functionality as the iPhone version, with auto-rotate, many editing effects and the ability to send (and view) photos stored online at your Photoshop.com page. And while some features are a little clunkier than on the iPhone (no pinch to twist and straighten photos — instead you need to access this via a “menu” item), in some ways it is slicker — the Android phone’s photo library is displayed from within the app, for example, instead of having to press the “select photo” button to see it as you do on the iPhone.

You can also run a slideshow of the pictures on your phone, something I can’t seem to do on my iPod Touch.

Photoshop.com Mobile for Android looks to be a fine, free download and you should grab it now. It isn’t as powerful as some mobile image-editors, but what it does it does just fine, and with a very slick interface.

Product page [Photoshop]


HTC Hero / Eris mega faceoff on video

Now that we’ve got the DROID Eris in the mix, we’re up to our ears in HTC Hero-derivative devices. We decided to sit the whole crew (GSM, Sprint and Verizon editions) down for a little modeling session, and we’re finding ourselves reticent to pick a favorite. There are really plusses and minuses to each of them, but any way you lean it’s a pretty good handset with some perhaps overly bulky software, a wonderful pricepoint (on Verizon, anyway) and probably a limited time in the sun with upcoming Android 2.0 devices, faster processors and wild new screens rolling on in. Check the video out after the break and you can make up your own mind.

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HTC Hero / Eris mega faceoff on video originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iPhone-to-Android Switch: 10 Things You Need to Know

You’ve had it. Maybe with AT&T. Maybe with Apple’s crushing, dictatorial grip strangling the App Store. Whatever the reason, you’re going to Android: Land of freedom, carriers not named AT&T, and the great Google. Here’s what you need to know.

It’s All in the Google Cloud

Android phones don’t sync with your computer. That’s because they don’t have to: Your contacts, calendar and mail are all kept up in the great Googleyplex. Unfortunately, Google’s Contacts manager, while it’s gotten better, is kinda crappy, and all of your Contacts are beamed down to your phone from there.

So even after you get the actual contacts you wanna talk to exported to Google Contacts, one problem is that all of your Google contacts, like everybody you email, show up on your phone. What you have to do is either sort your contacts into different groups and tell the phone’s Contacts app to show only the groups you only wanna see, or to only show you people with phone numbers. If you wanna sync your contacts, so you have a master copy on your computer and can manage them from there, that problem takes a bit of legwork—at least on Windows.

If you’re on a Mac, it’s easy to keep your Contacts synced—just tell Address Book to sync with Google. On Windows, you’ll need a third-party app, like GO contact. That way, you can manage your contacts on your desktop, and have a local copy that’s always synced up with what Google’s got.

Calendars are easier: Google’s got an app for that.

Exchange support varies from version to version: Android 2.0 has it, previous vanilla versions of Android don’t, but carriers like Sprint and hardware makers like HTC have been rolling their own Exchange solution into Android. Check the box, in other words.

The Gmail App Is Amazing

If your primary email account is Gmail, that’s almost reason enough to go Android. Not only is Gmail pushed to your phone, the Gmail app is an absolutely perfect rendition of the Gmail experience for the small screen. Threaded conversations (hurray), full label support, starring, archiving and a true Gmail look-and-feel. It’s even better in Android 2.0, which finally includes support for using multiple Google accounts with the Gmail app, and a few interface tweaks to make it easier to use.

For your non-Google accounts, there’s a separate email app that’s a pretty standard IMAP/POP mobile email app. Not amazing, not bad.

For That Matter, All of the Google Apps Are Amazing

You might be switching to Android for political reasons, or just to get away from AT&T, but what’s gonna make switching actually work is that all of the Google services are fantastic, and often, more powerful than their iPhone counterparts.

Google Talk is the non-Gmail killer app for me, and highlights just how badly the iPhone needs a native messaging app—it’s like BlackBerry Messenger, but for Google. (Or mobile AIM, but less shitty.) Keep in mind, anyone signed in to Gmail on a desktop browser can be reached through Google Talk if they’ve authorized it, so you’ve probably got more “buddies” than you might realize.

Latitude is actually built into the Maps app; Google Voice integrates seamlessly; and Google actually frequently releases updates them the Android Marketplace. Oh, and did I mention Google Navigation? Yeah.

What Google hasn’t gotten around to yet is integrating Google Docs, but the web version with Android’s HTML5-superpowered browser is pretty good.

Not Being on AT&T Is Just as Liberating As You’d Hoped

I’ve never had full bars on any Android phone—on T-Mobile, Sprint or Verizon—and not been able to do something online. End of story.

Multitasking Is All It’s Cracked Up to Be, Mostly

“Hey look, someone @replied me on Twitter!” Pull down the window shade, check it out, go back to browsing this month’s custard calendar. “Oh hey, an email.” Down comes the window shade, I reply, and then instantly return to drooling more over pumpkin-pie custard, before flipping to Google Talk to tell my friend when we’re going to slaughter zombies in Left 4 Dead 2 demo. All in 10 seconds, while listening to Pandora radio.

The drop down window shade is pure genius, and what makes the cacophony of background notifications from all the apps you’ve got running work. See, you don’t actually close apps in Android like on the iPhone. You just switch between them, and the OS takes care of closing apps you haven’t used in a while in the background. (Unless inside of an app, you explicitly tell it to shutdown, like Twidroid.) Anything a background app wants to tell you goes into the notification windowshade. Sure, there’s a bit of lag switching back to the browser and then scrolling is choppy for a second on some phones, but it’s a small price to pay. And bigger batteries in more recent hardware, like the Droid, are enough to make it through the day.

Android Takes More Work

Every version of Android gets a little smoother, a little more user-friendly, but stock versions are pretty barebones. Want to read a PDF attached to an email? You need an app. Visual voicemail? Gotta download it unless your carrier preinstalls one. Want a notepad? Find it on the Market. HTC takes care a lot of these little humps with their custom builds—which includes a PDF viewer out of the box, for example—and generally speaking, there’s an app for the basic holes that need to be filled in, but get ready to do a little bit of legwork.

It’s Not Quite as Secure

The lock screen is a series of swipes—not an actual passcode—and there’s no remote wipe out of the box. Granted, with the iPhone you need a MobileMe plan to get remote wipe, but you don’t have to look for an app to install, like SMobile Security Shield.

It’s also less secure in the app department, at least on paper: Under Android, you can opt to install unverified programs through the settings menu. This may be a good thing to you—even your reason for switching—but it carries obvious extra risks.

The Android Marketplace Isn’t as Nice as the App Store (Yet)

The only place to look for apps and install them is directly on your phone, through the Android Marketplace. With Android 1.6, the Marketplace did get a lot nicer to browse, with a new interface and actual app screenshots, but categories are still too broad, and you still can’t do any of this on your desktop, where you have a much bigger screen. Updating apps? You’ve gotta do them one at a time, which is annoying.

The App Situation Is Getting Better, But Isn’t There Yet

So here’s the thing. The app ecosystem on Android has absolutely exploded, so it’s much, much better place to be than it was six months ago, much less a year ago. In fact, for a lot of your everyday iPhone apps, there’s now an Android counterpart or equivalent: Facebook, Pandora, Slacker, Remember the Milk, Foursquare, Shazam, Flixster, etc. The problem is, they’re universally not as polished or full-featured. Facebook’s missing messaging and events entirely; Twidroid, the best Twitter app, is hideous compared to any of the top 5 iPhone Twitter apps; Photoshop’s lacks some of the effects it has on the iPhone.

Gaming is probably the single biggest thing you’ll miss. There are games, yes. Some of them good. There aren’t as many and they’re not as fantastic. There’s nothing Star Defense caliber. Or Sim City. (Oops.) Partly, this is simply a numbers issue: Android’s not as big as the iPhone yet. But the other aspect is that there’s a serious storage limitation for apps—just 256MB in some phones—which seriously cramps what some games can do, as well as how many apps you can install on you phone. Apps will get better, the app economy will get better, this is true. But for now, be ready for some limitations and possibly, disappointments.

Music and Video? Just Buy a Zune HD

Kidding. Sort of. Getting music and video onto your Android phone is a purely drag and drop operation—there’s no official Google sync application to organize and get your 10 gigs of music onto your phone. There is an Amazon MP3 store, and it’s okay. There are third-party solutions, like DoubleTwist or Windows Media Player. But once you get the music on there, the music player itself kinda blows. It’s ugly and just not very nice to use. On the upside, it plays Ogg Vorbis, open source fans.

Movie watchers are in even worse shape with Android. Your best bet is to avoid the native player that’s sort of hidden and to actually use a third party app, Meridian. Or just get a Zune HD for your music and video, and you’ll be much happier.

I think that covers the basics guys. Yeah, Android’s not as polished or smooth, but you know what? It’s actually quite livable over here. If there’s something else you wanna know—or want to share—about switching, drop it into the comments.

Why I’m Not Getting a Droid Today

droid-iphone

I’ve been testing the Verizon Droid for the past few days, and it’s an awesome phone.

But even though I’m eager to ditch my iPhone and eighty-six AT&T, I’m not going to switch to Verizon for the Droid.

Don’t get me wrong: I am very impressed with what Motorola has built. In my mind, the Droid and the iPhone are the two best smartphones on the market today. The Droid can compete with the iPhone in almost every respect.

In some features, such as the screen, it comes out way ahead: The Droid’s vivid, high-resolution 854 x 440 pixel display blows away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 screen. It’s simply crisper, clearer, and easier to read. (Note: The photo above does not do it justice.)

Voice-call quality is much better than on the iPhone. Callers sounded crisp and clear. And I was able to set up Google Voice to work with both incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages — something you cannot do with the iPhone.

For that matter, since all of my contacts, calendars and e-mails are hosted by Google now, setting up the Droid to work with my information took me less than five minutes. Because I have more than 3,000 contacts it took the Droid nearly an hour to sync them all to the phone over the 3G network (and during that time, the phone got alarmingly warm), but I never had to install desktop software or even plug in any cables.

It was hands-down the easiest and fastest setup process of any phone I’ve used, and when it was done, the phone had everything I needed. (By contrast, getting the iPhone to sync with Google was a tricky and time-consuming process — and you need to install iTunes and connect your iPhone to your computer by USB in any event.)

The Droid also uses Verizon’s 3G network, which in my ad hoc testing came out ahead of AT&T’s. Downloads seemed faster, and the data connections were generally more reliable. It still dropped one of my calls, as I was riding the commuter train, in almost exactly the same spot where AT&T inevitably drops my iPhone calls. Without further side-by-side testing I can’t definitively state whether the Droid on Verizon’s network trumps the iPhone on AT&T’s, but my sense is that it generally does.

In terms of interface and features, the Droid is the first phone that’s truly comparable to the iPhone in terms of power and ease of use. There are interface differences, but for the most part they’re not better or worse, just different.

Multitouch is the most glaring omission, which means you can’t pinch to zoom the screen. But, like the iPhone, you can double-tap to zoom in, and the Droid is similarly smart about sizing the screen to fit whatever column of text you want to read.

Its onscreen keyboard works almost exactly like the iPhone’s, and is even superior in that you can choose among multiple type-ahead suggestions rather than just waiting for the phone to suggest the one you really want.

And while there are only about 10,000 Android apps, compared with the iPhone’s 100,000, there seems to be plenty of selection. The Android Market should be more than enough to keep me happy, with a couple of exceptions.

The reason I’m not switching to the Droid is twofold. First, the hardware keyboard troubles me. It’s not especially good, and I worry that the slide-out mechanism could be prone to failure. There’s no way to confirm that other than heavy use for three to six months, but it’s a risk I’m not quite ready to take — especially because the onscreen, virtual keyboard is so good.

With such a good virtual keyboard, the hardware keyboard seems like an unnecessary and even dangerous, trouble-prone appendage, like an appendix or a vestigial tail: It can only cause problems.

Plus, it adds weight; the Droid, at 6 ounces, is about 2 ounces heavier than the iPhone. So I’d rather wait for a lighter, keyboard-less version of the Droid.

The second big reason is that I’ve grown dependent on two iPhone apps: Instapaper Pro and Tweetie. I also occasionally use RunKeeper, Stanza, Pandora and a handful of games, but Instapaper and Tweetie are the killer apps. They’re the things that, together with e-mail capability, make the iPhone useful to me.

Tweetie I could probably learn to live without: There are plenty of Twitter apps for Android, and the most popular one, Twidroid, seems to work fine, even if it lacks Tweetie’s elegance and speed. But Instapaper’s ability to collect, reformat and display news articles and blog posts I want to read — even if I’m offline — has made it an indispensable commuter and downtime companion. I would sorely miss it.

So while I’m no fan of AT&T or Apple, I’ll be sticking with the iPhone now. It’s one of the two best smartphones on the market, and it’s the only one that has the apps I depend on.

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Photo credit: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com


LG to announce Snapdragon-boasting Android phone, Korea-bound in 2010

It’s looking like LG will be offering an Android phone boasting Qualcomm’s hot Snapdragon chip — which has recently squeezed its way into handsets such as the Xperia X10 and Acer’s Liquid. The new LG mobile phone is expected for the Korean market in the second quarter of 2010. While the device is still unnamed and specs are still a mystery, LG is promising that the device will be “more mature” than the GW620 Eve, an Android device announced earlier this week for Rogers in Canada. There’s no solid word on what availability of the device will be like, though LG says its considering possibilities outside of Korea.

[Via Slashgear]

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LG to announce Snapdragon-boasting Android phone, Korea-bound in 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PSA: Sears charging $50 less for new DROID activations than Verizon

If you walk into a Verizon store today and pick up a DROID, you’ll be out $300 (before tax) out of pocket, then you’ll twiddle your thumbs for a few weeks while you wait for some mysterious PO box in Texas to send you your $100 rebate on a debit card. Wouldn’t you rather just pay $200 upfront? Or better yet, $150? Sears — which, we have to admit, we didn’t know sold phones — is charging just $150 without a rebate for the DROID today, a full $50 less than Big Red proper with rebate. We don’t know how good these guys are with customer service (Simplexity is running the store on Sears’ behalf, it seems), but truth be told, we can deal with a little incompetency for $50.

[Via I4U]

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PSA: Sears charging $50 less for new DROID activations than Verizon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Poll: Will the DROID have you in its clutches?

We’ve already got some smartphone beasts in the market like the Pre and the iPhone, but Android hasn’t really had a supercharged, drool-worthy device yet — a knight in shining armor ready to sweep the platform off its feet and ride off into the sunset. The DROID could very well be that device, so we’re turning the question over to you: are you jumping in?

View Poll

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Poll: Will the DROID have you in its clutches? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DROID mania sweeps the nation, so to speak

It appears that last night’s midnight opening in Manhattan went off like gangbusters, but the situation across the country is a little more subdued this morning with seemingly short lines and easy access to DROIDs at every location we’ve visited. We won’t put out a number, but we can confirm that several Engadget editors have taken the plunge today — and if riffraff like us can waltz into the store and get them, you should certainly be able to. Good luck being assimilated out there today, and be sure to post pictures of your experience in comments (up above we’ve got San Francisco’s first buyer courtesy of Ross Miller, and after the break, you can live it up with the good folks of Albany as they were paid a visit by Tim Stevens).

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DROID mania sweeps the nation, so to speak originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon confirms DROID tethering cost, will ask subscribers to double-down on their data plan

Verizon confirms DROID tethering cost, will ask subscribers to double-down on their data plan

Just a few days ago Verizon made the less-than-shocking confirmation that DROID tethering was coming, but wouldn’t say how much it would cost. Now that the hardest of hardcore fans are already waiting in line, disconnected from the world at large, the company is unleashing the bad news: it’ll be $30. That doubles the cost of the required data plan that sits atop a subscriber’s voice plan, meaning a total of $60 per month for “unlimited” data access on handset or laptop. Mind you, “unlimited” really means 5GB of data per, a total of 10 split between the two $30 plans. Glass ceilings: we hate them.

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Verizon confirms DROID tethering cost, will ask subscribers to double-down on their data plan originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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