Hasta La Gadget!

It’s hard to look at the DROID without looking at the company which brought the device to life. Motorola: for years the name has been synonymous with… well, disappointment. While the industry-stalwart made cellphones sexy with the RAZR, the days which followed have not been especially fruitful or compelling. Over the past year or so, we’ve seen Motorola beating its way back into the mainstream through a series of smart plays: first embracing Android as a platform, then shucking off the weight of Windows Mobile and finally bringing some desirable (and high profile) devices to market.

With the DROID, the company has perhaps created its most attractive and intriguing piece of technology yet. Forging an alliance with both Verizon and Google, Motorola has come up with a second compelling reason to count the phonemaker down, but certainly not out, while the other two giants have finally found a seemingly worthy device to position against the iPhone. So we must pose these questions: is this the phone which will catapult Android into the mainstream? Is it the device that will pull Motorola back from the brink? And — most importantly — is it the lynchpin Google and Verizon have needed to challenge the leader in mindshare in the smartphone market? After putting the device through its paces, we think we can give you the answers you seek — so read on to find out!

Continue reading Motorola DROID review

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola DROID review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Boy, TomTom sure has chosen the worst possible time to release its Car Kit for iPhone, and to make matters worse, its decision to not include the iPhone app is now set in stone. That’s right, the hardware alone will set you back the cost of a TomTom ONE nowadays, and the $99.95 app works on the iPhone 3G and 3GS without it. So here’s the question: is the car kit worth the extra $119.95? To find out, we got hold of a review unit for a sunny road trip around London. Surprisingly, the car kit uses Bluetooth to connect the GPS receiver to the iPhone, even though there’s a dock connector for charging. Bluetooth connectivity does have its advantages: according to TomTom it can work as a generic Bluetooth GPS receiver for any satellite navigation app on the iPhone, or any smartphones at all for that matter. TomTom even confirmed that the car kit could potentially compensate for the first-generation iPhone’s lack of built-in GPS, but since its app won’t run on anything but a 3G or 3GS we’ll have to wait and see if that’s actually useful. Meanwhile, the company is cooking up a compatible app for the original iPhone and the iPod Touch, which could make the car kit more worthwhile. Read on for our hands-on impression and test videos.

[Thanks for being our driver, Sam]

Continue reading TomTom Car Kit for iPhone review

Filed under: GPS, Transportation

TomTom Car Kit for iPhone review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s just something about Apple that makes people go crazy whenever the company’s lawyers do even the simplest things — whether it’s filing routine trademark oppositions, getting patents granted, or, uh, defending allegations that the company is in league with the Mafia, Steve and friends just seem to inspire some strong reactions whenever they end up in the courtroom. So of course things got a little wild last Thursday when Nokia announced it was suing Apple over ten patents related to GSM, UMTS (what you know as 3G) and WiFi — the pundit class immediately set upon the idea that the lawsuit was some sort of reaction to Nokia’s diminishing cellphone marketshare and the perceived dominance of the iPhone, perhaps best exemplified by John Gruber’s flippant “If you can’t beat ’em, sue ’em.” Nokia can’t compete against Apple, so obviously it’s abusing the hopelessly-broken patent system get a little payback, Espoo-style — right?

Well, wrong. As usual, the race to hype this dispute as a bitter standoff between two tech giants desperate to destroy one another has all but ignored the reality of how patents — especially wireless patents — are licensed, what Nokia’s actually asking for, and how it might go about getting it. And as you know, we just don’t do things that way, so we’ve asked our old friend Mathew Gavronski, a patent attorney in the Chicago office of Michael Best & Friedrich, to help us sort things out and figure out what’s really going on here — read on for more.

Continue reading Nokia vs. Apple: the in-depth analysis

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia vs. Apple: the in-depth analysis originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve got the DROID in our hands… and it is sweet. Moto claims that this is the thinnest full QWERTY slider on the market, and we’re apt to believe it. The phone is incredibly slick and solid, and we’re definitely looking forward to putting it through its paces. We’ll have more photos, video, and a full review coming, so stay tuned!

Some quick observations on the phone:

• That big screen is killer. Bright, crisp, and tons of room for your icons and widgets.
• Speed is noticeably improved — particularly when moving from app to app. We did notice that some of the home screen scrolling looked laggy.
• Android 2.0 is definitely cleaned up — but it’s most definitely still Android
• The browser seems significantly improved — pages now load up in a fully zoomed-out mode, and the load times and scrolling are way snappier.
• The keyboard takes some getting used to, and it suffers from a similar hand-position issue as the G1, but it’s fairly usable. We think it’ll be second nature once we spend some time with it.
• Facebook is integrated into accounts, which means some of that BLUR functionality is here (though now it’s part of Android 2.0 natively). The good news is that when you add a Facebook account you can choose to pull all Facebook info and contacts, or just info related to your existing contacts — a real clutter buster.

Update: We’ve added a new gallery, and video is on the way!

Update 2: Video is up after the break! More coming too…

Update 3: And we’ve got a browser speed test to round things out.

Update 4: We’ve added another gallery of the car and home docks, which are pretty neat — the phone detects the dock magnetically, and switches to the appropriate mode. We’re told that there’ll also be third-party docks, and that Google’s the one behind the different interface modes, so this could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Continue reading Motorola DROID first hands-on! (update: video, impressions, more pics)

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola DROID first hands-on! (update: video, impressions, more pics) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Desktop icons seem to have a mind of their own, and when you least expect it they will popup in different positions. This happens all the time when I plug my laptop into a second monitor since the two screens have a different resolutions.

There are some things that you can do to save the position of your icons, and quickly be able to restore them back to their rightful state. The How-To Geek posted a great tip today on how to do this the easy way. I’ve actually been using tweak since back in the early days of XP (for at least 5 years now) and is probably one of the oldest sites that still resides in my bookmarks. I had originally found it on a site called NTHelp, and the "hack" has been a must-have addition all these years for me (on both XP and Vista).

All you have to do is download the two files, either from NTHelp or How-To Geek, and copy the Layout.dll into your C:’Windows’System32’ directory. Then double-click on Layout.reg to have the contents of the file imported into your registry, and now you’re all set. You can now save and restore the position of your desktop icons simply by right-clicking on the Computer option in your Start Menu:

The only problem with this is that it can’t remember multiple "profiles" for your desktop icons. Having multiple profiles that you can switch between would be nice for anyone that hooks their laptop up to several different monitors that all have different resolutions (work, home, standalone, etc…). The program I’ve always recommended to people in that situation is Shock Desktop (XP/2000/2003/Vista). It provides a System Tray icon that lets you create as many different profiles as you would like:

The program is completely free, and there is a version that comes with an installer as well as one without an installer. One of the unique features that it does actually have is the ability to bring your desktop icons in front of all the windows using an assignable hotkey. You’ll no longer have to minimize all your windows to get to your desktop icons! I’ve had problems with this working on Vista, but on XP it is a nice addition.

Tip: You can also get to your desktop icons quickly in Windows by pressing the Windows Key + D. This will minimize all your open windows, and pressing the same key combination will restore all of the windows that were just minimized.

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