This review is all about me. Just like everything else... It's a look at the new Motorola DROID Smartphone using the Android mobile operating system, available to Verizon Wireless customers, from MY standpoint.

This article is also, to some degree, not written for Geeks like me. Oh, there I go again. I hope that it won't make SOME of the assumptions about the reader that other online reviews seem to do.

My needs are simple. A reliable cell phone with full Microsoft Exchange integration, a keyboard (as opposed to a screen-based key pad), tethering, a Maserati, and a million a year. That's all. Actually, if you know me you know I couldn't possibly fit in the Maserat. I didn't get most of these things in the DROID. The million a year was a particular problem and I'm writing this from behind bars. Thank goodness for wireless Internet. It's not that it's a bad phone. But if your needs are like mine, you'll probably want to look elsewhere. Also, I'm a dedicated Verizon customer and, as such, I'm only interested in (and truly able to review) phones that operate on its CDMA network. The perfect phone for me might work on T-Mobile and I won't be buying it.

Here are the good points and a little background. First is that this phone uses a comparatively new and fairly compact operating system. Just as your computer uses Windows or MacOS or Unix to provide the user interface and to be a layer between the programs (aka applications or "apps") and the processor chip, so does your cell phone. The more basic cell phones don't have anything fancy. The smart phones have choices (in order of worldwide share as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system) like Symbian OS on Nokia phones (mostly in Europe), Blackberry's OS (on the RIM Blackberry, obviously), iPhone OS (on the Apple iPhone - I was surprised to see it having 13.7% market share [Q2 2009] & the #3 position), Windows Mobile (currently up to v6.5 on the Imagio and other models), Android by Google and the Open Handset Alliance, and WebOS (for Palm phones). As a capitalist I'm always glad to see new competition and the Android is an Open Source operating system giving programmers the greatest access to it and the phone's hardware. Many people think that iPhoneOS is Open Source - it's not but it does have an amazing base of over 100,000 3rd party programs (aka "apps") available for it. To create an app & have it run fully on the iPhone (and be available at the iPhone App Store) the developer must pay Apple Inc. a fee. Such is not the case for Android. Apps are available for the other OS's too but with them the developer has varying levels of access to the hardware and OS itself. Android stands to be a major competitor to all of these operating systems if it can build a following and huge library of available apps like the iPhone has. I'm rooting for the little, Open Source, guy.

I've been a Windows Mobile user since v5 and have been reasonably happy with it. As much as I'm a geek and I love cool toys, I'm not suffering just because WinMo doesn't have even close to 100,000 apps available for it. The iPhone also has an amazing human interface that nobody can "touch" yet - with your finger(s) you can not only move things around but you can use other "gestures" for ease of manipulation. But the iPhone has no PHYSICAL keyboard - after my underwhelming experience with the Samsung Omnia I've determined that my big fingers only work well with keys I can feel. So, I decided it was time to reassess and the only options with pull-out keyboards available to Verizon customers at this moment are the Droid and the HTC Touch Pro and Touch Pro 2. Which leads me to:

Second: the phone has a decent, backlit, pullout keyboard. There are phones, like my erstwhile Palm Treo and the Samsung Saga, that have "keys" on the phone - they're really just little tiny buttons and, while they're better FOR ME than an on-screen keypad, the keyboard is best. I had an HTC/Verizon VX6700 phone once and, while it wasn't stable and I dumped it, it had a fine pullout keyboard on it yet, unlike it, The Droid's keyboard is part of the main unit and the screen slides instead. I think this makes it better balanced in the hands.

Other positives:

• The phone itself is solid & masculine. Like a hunk of metal & I find that reassuring. It's not a phone for the dainty handed. It's about 1/2" thick and 2 3/8" wide by 4 1/2" long. It weighs 6oz (vs 4oz for my Omnia). I think I could drive over it with my Tahoe and still answer the call from wife asking why am I driving over my cell phone. "Science, honey!"
• The 480 x 854 pixel screen is very crisp with good colors.
• The Webkit HTML5 browser (related to Safari) works well & scrolls smoothly but will there be web pages that reject it because its not Firefox or Internet Explorer? You can double-tap it and get a +/- tool that lets you zoom in considerably to read small text. Nice for us "gently used" models...
• the audio quality was excellent and the speakerphone was loud and crisp
• A Notification bar lets you know the status of everything - text messages, alerts, calls, etc. in one place.
• Has all the modern sensors: accelerometer (tells the screen to switch from landscape to portrait), proximity (probably tells it when it's near your ear and thus to turn off the display until you pull it away), ambient light (probably changes the screen brightness) and eCompass (?).
• The usual Smartphone accoutrements you have to have today to be competitive in the market: stereo Bluetooth, 5MP camera w/ flash and movie, music player, headset jack, USB, WiFi, memory card, & GPS.

Really, it's a Google Phone. Look at this list of Google Mobile Services: ANDROID MARKET™, GMAIL™, GOOGLE CALENDAR™. GOOGLE CONTACT SYNC™,GOOGLE LATITUDE™, GOOGLE MAPS w/STREET VIEW, GOOGLE MAPS™ NAVIGATION BETA, GOOGLE QUICK SEARCH BOX™, GOOGLE SEARCH™ BY VOICE, GOOGLE TALK™ and YOUTUBE™. It's Gmail centric - the first thing I saw when I turned it on was a wizard about setting up Gmail. Call me unhip but I don't use Gmail.

The nav app is excellent - like Google Maps plus - but unlike a true GPS unit it won't work when there's no coverage (the maps data is downloaded, not stored on the phone) so don't take it hiking in the boonies or on a long trip away from civilization. There's an optional car kit so you can use Google Maps while driving. It's absolutely amazing to see not only your route like on a typical GPS, but even photos of each turn and your destination, for extra confirmation that you didn't make "a left toin in Albakoikie or a right toin in Lajawlah" ( -Bugs Bunny). I could not find the very BASIC (that word again) information of my heading, speed, and coordinates.

But, as I said, I just need the basics. Exchange mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, as fully integrated as possible. A good browser. IMAP for my personal mail. Tethering for my laptop. Programmable buttons. Voice dial w/ audible feedback (which makes it much safer to use w/ a headset when driving). For those unfamiliar with it, Microsoft Exchange is a "Collaboration Server". This means it's based around email and contacts and calendars but it enables people working together to share these items as they see fit. Other examples, though arguably less evolved and definitely not even close to as heavily adopted by corporate users. The Exchange integration on the Droid is quite rudimentary and less than I require:

• It doesn't respect outlook folder hierarchy. Exchange, like many email programs, allows the user to have all kinds of folders to keep their mail in. You can have folders in folders in folders, just like on your computer desktop or in you filing cabinet. Droid just shows all the folders at the same level - you can't expand and collapse them. This makes my folder list very long. Also, not one of these folders was synchronized. Only the INBOX. I could find no way to tell it which folders to sync as I can with Windows Mobile.,
• I can't sort contacts. They are all listed by FIRST name. In Windows Mobile, they are listed by LAST name, which makes more sense for business purposes as far as I'm concerned, and I can also sort by business name . However, the SEARCH function for Contacts was quick so that helps a bit.
• Perhaps most important for someone like me who can't remember squat - THERE'S NO TASKS INTEGRATION. I live by my To Do list.
• When I send emails they appear in the SENT folder on my PC but not the SENT folder on the Droid.

Other items that this phone is missing that are forcing me to return it to the ever-patient Franco at Imagineering Wireless (he must have spent two hours with me getting my accounts all moved around and getting the phone registered just so we could "mess" with it):

• There are no programmable buttons which are so convenient. On WinMo phones, one can assign 4 different functions to 2 buttons. I assign camera, voice dial, desktop, and task switcher.
• I was under impression one could change batteries without a reboot but didn't work for me.
• Voice dialing:
  • • was neither as accurate in recognizing my voice as Microsoft's Voice Command is, nor did it give any verbal confirmation.
    • The WinMo "Lady In The Phone" will also give you choices if she finds more than one. Droid just lists them (and typically a lot of them) on the screen and you must pick one. I'll take WinMo's Voice Command any day for dialing handsfree.
    • If your Voice Dialer results were incorrect, the app disappears and you have to go back to the application list and restart it each time, while The "Lady In The Phone" will say "try again" and you can restate your request.
    • When I told Voice Dialer to dual 858-555-1234, I got 10 results. WinMo just dialed the number.

• There are no SEND and END buttons on the phone itself. Hey, first and foremost this is a PHONE! This isn't a deal killer but I just can't believe there's no good ol' green and red buttons on the phone. The call control buttons are on the touch screen like everything else except the camera button and the power button.
• The specs say it will do IMAP and POP3 mail (the kind you have at home) but when I go to the Add an Account page all I see is Corporate (MS Exchange), Facebook, and Gmail.
• I haven't found a way to have the convenient desktop status like what I have with WinMo. Things like what appointments I have today, how many new emails, how many active tasks, how many text messages, the date, and the WiFi and Bluetooth states. Droid does have that convenient Notification bar that you pull down but I like them in plain sight.
• Technically, this phone can tether to my laptop, providing it with EVDO Internet connectivity. But Verizon, TYPICALLY, will not permit this until "next year".

So, I guess it's going to be the Touch Pro 2. It's about the same price and got such good reviews that it sold out after it was first available. I hope they're still in stock. A review is promised when I've had time to play with it.

If you're one of the unfortunate few SideKick owners who lost personal data when the huge Microsoft server farm hiccupped recently fate may be smiling on you. As per T-Mobile Forums:

Beginning [10/20/09], log into the My.T-Mobile website, where there will be a recovery tool to restore contacts you may have lost during the recent service outage. This tool will enable you to view the contacts you had on your device as of October 1.

Here's what Microsoft says, in a press release from earlier this month. It's a sad situation but one that we can all learn from: Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Everyone of these poor folks should have been doing local backups as well as counting on M$.   This goes for all of us and for all forms of electronic storage - if it's important back it up AND archive it.

Backups and Archives
There are two actions here with slight differences.

"Backing Up" something typically means having it available in case of a complete loss. Backups are typically overwritten with new data as it changes. A backup lets you reload all of your data when something fails, like a hard disk.

"Archiving" something means having various versions of those backups - these are backups that you save forever. An archive lets you go back and grab an earlier edit of something or an item you've deleted. People often make "snapshots" of their data once a month (whatever period is prudent for their work) and keep it offsite, maybe in a safe deposit box or at Iron Mountain. People who do backups by rotating a set up takes over the period of a month or so typically rotate OUT one of those tapes. It goes to the permanent storage location and a new tape replaces it. This also ensures that, over a year or so, all tapes get replaced with new ones.

Offsite Backups
With today's more ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections, offsite storage has become a popular way of backing up and archiving. Companies like Carbonite and Mozy provide a simple "client" (program) that sends copies of your files, over the Internet, at predifined intervals (or whenever changed). The up sides to this are:

• You can access these files from anywhere in the world that has Internet access. Your laptop lost it in Lisbon? Buy a new one and then download all your saved files - this CAN take days.
• When "THE BIG ONE" hits, the backups you wrote to DVD and stored at your Mom's house may be just as useless as your PC. These offsite organizations reduce this risk by storing your data at geographically dispersed locations
• Media-based backups (tapes, DVD, Flash Drives) removed from the premises can be lost and STOLEN. Just ask the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Identity Theft Resource Center about "breaches" that occur when a tape, containing millions of social security numbers, is stolen from someone's car while being transported. The better Offsite services encrypt your data before it leaves your PC and is stored encrypted. Only you, by keeping a special code someplace safe, can access your data. Even the Offsite people can't help you if you lose this code.

The down side is simply TIME. You've got gigbytes of data and megabits of speed. Typically, when they first sign up for it, a business using a service like this must let all their data get sent to the service over a weekend or longer. Once it's up-to-date, only the changes to the data are sent which takes much less bandwidth and time.

Storage Devices
For businesses, companies like SonicWALL make appliances that do backups locally to a hard drive (so that people can have access to deleted files and for quick repair of damaged hard drives) AND send a customer-specified fraction of that data offsite (typically, stuff they could not live without if THE WORST happened, like accounting files, HR records, order data, etc).

Even a simple flash drive, an external USB/Firewire hard drive or a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive can at least provide backups of your files and even versions of them, if not the bennies of offsite storage. NAS is like an external drive except that it connects over your local ethernet or WiFi LAN. And since it's networked, every PC in your home or small office can use it. If you're tech savvy, you can create a simple NAS machine by using an old PC to run Windows, MacOS, or Linux - just stick it someplace out of the way and let it collect files.

It's a Cinch to Synch
I work from home. I am connected to a Windows server across the Internet. I store many of my files, including My Documents on that server. I also use Windows' Sync Manager to  make them available to me when the Internet is down or when I switch to my laptop. Every time a file syncs to the server, an invisible copy is stored on my PC. If my Internet connection (or even the remote server) fails, I can use and even edit the "offline copy". Once it comes back up, Windows knows to update the server version with any changes made in the interim. If I edited the file on my laptop, the server will get this new version as will my PC. Since the originals are stored away from my home on this server, it counts as an offsite backup as well as a way to synchronize between multiple machines.

Major online presences like Google allow you to store files there. You can use free Google Docs to store files so you have backups and so they're available to you virtually anyplace. The downside is that you have to upload and maintain these files manually and they aren't encrypted.

It must mean that we're busy communicating, which is generally a good thing! All over the country, the public phone system is running out of numbers in the existing telephone exchanges and, therefore, new ones must be added. If you live in an area presently covered by the 760 area code you're going to have to do a little more button pusing for local calls!

First it was fax machines. Next it was modems for early Internet access. Now it's cell phones. Even though most people today are using broadband Internet access and have forsaken the modems, the number of numbers needed keeps going up. To keep up, either a geographical area has to be split up with one part keeping the old area code and the other getting a new area code, OR, a new area code must be added to the same geographical area as an old one. This latter method is called an overlay because you can think of it as a piece of clear plastic having been overlain on a map, with the old area code underneath and the new one on top.

A Little History
In the past splits have been the norm. Did you know that all of Southern California originally had 213 as its area code (it was one of the original US area codes from 1947)? It was split in 1951 so that all of So. Cal except LA had 714. In 1982, 714 was split so that San Diego, Imperial, and parts of other counties to the north got 619 and 714 stayed with Orange County. In 1997-1999, 619 was split so that (roughly) Mission Valley-and-south kept 619, the north part of The City and some contiguous towns got 858, and the rest of the old 619 a/c got 760. http://www.area-codes.com/area-code-history.asp  From a single Southern California area code in 1947 to at least 19 today, each allowing for roughly 8 million unique numbers, we've been ordering a lot of phone numbers!

The Pros and Cons
SPLIT: Originally, the San Diego County section of the 760 area, shown here, was going to be given the new 442 area code. An advantage of this approach is that people calling neighbors and businesses in the same area code only have to dial 7 digits. The downside is that businesses having billboards, phone numbers on vehicles, stationery, etc. must pay to change this all. The folks at Keep760.org, aided by UCAN's Michael Shames, felt this was costly. They got the PUC to change to an overlay.

OVERLAY: With an overlay, you simply have 2 areas codes in the same geographical area. It wasn't possible to do this until the 1990's. So, businesses with 760 stationery can keep it. A new business, perhaps right next-door to that one might, after November 21, 2009, be issued a 442 area code phone number. The down side - and it isn't much of one - is that a person in (e.g.) Oceanside, having a 760 phone number, will have to dial 1-760-555-0100 to ring their next door neighbor. That's 11 digits vs 7. This is necessary because the local phone switching equipment would not know if that neighbor was 760-555-0100 or 442-555-0100 if you simply dialed 555-0100.

Considering the facts that we're using quickly dialed touchtone phones vs the old dial phones (do young people today even know why we say to "dial" a number?) and that many people have their favorite numbers stored in memories anyway, and that many of the numbers we dial today are outside our local area code and, thus, require 11 digits ANYWAY, the overlay was clearly less of a hassle for people who would have to change things and a minimal hassle for those who will have to dial extra digits.

Still A Local Call
Many "experienced" humans equate area codes with Long Distance and thus CHARGES!!!!  Fret not, those of us who remember dialing MA5-1212! These days, long distance charges are based, truly, on distance, and not the phone number. See my posting on Phones and Zones: How AT&T bills you for calls not considered long distance which will help you understand how to know what calls you might have to pay for.

So 760-folks, just go ahead and call that friend up the street and don't worry about costs changing. You might consider editing your speed dials and contacts, though, so they all have 1 + the area code. And when 442 numbers start appearing just treat them as neighbors, too!

If it's a pain in the butt to connect your smart cell phone to your PC and get it to sync, open as a storage device, connect as a speakerphone, do your laundry, etc., Windows 7 should help.

Scheduled for release on October 22, 2009, Windows 7, the much awaited REPLACEMENT for Vista (which just never got the love M$ had hoped) has some interesting new features. One is called DEVICE STAGE. You can see a brief video about it here. In essence, when you connect your phone by USB (or probably by Bluetooth but I don't know that for a fact), the phone is recognized by Windows which shows a picture of your specific phone in a small window. If you click on that window you get a list of all tricks the phone can do with Windows 7. Windows 7 also does this with printers, flash drives, digital cameras, etc.

As soon as I get a chance to actually play with Windows 7 I'll let you know if it does Device Stage as described. In the meantime, if upgrading to Windows 7, be sure you have enough RAM and horsepower and be sure to read about XP Mode and the machine requirements.If you have XP or Vista you can download and run this convenient Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor tool that not only vets your hardware but also your drivers and software and tells which of these latter 2 may not work on Windows 7.