I am a die hard iPhone user, but I also closely follow all developments in the smartphone industry… I have gotten a hold of a few Droid X phones and I find myself just lusting after the huge screen sizes. I do a ton of web browsing and reading on my iPhone and a little more screen real estate would make a huge difference.
It seems this issue comes up every week on the weekly podcast I cohost, Vaestro Weekly, of course, that’s because I bring it up.
What I haven’t gotten a feel for is how user friendly the Droid is. The iPhone’s genious is that it is so SIMPLE to use that everyone can use it. It is like the Facebook of smartphones. Is the Droid X (or any Android phone) like that?
Also, I plan on getting over my screen size fix with an iPad someday soon.
Big huge caveat on this…if your workplace requires encryption on the device (which is an Activesync setting), then you may have problems connecting using an Android based phone. I say may, because the Droid Incredible supports encryption, and I think you can use an app called Touchdown for Exchange to get encryption support. Even then, it’s email encryption, not whole device. I work for a healthcare company and we require any device with our email on it to be encrypted.
The iPhone 3GS and 4 both support Exchange encryption.
The Zoolander joke of the microscopic cellphone is really dated now. Phones got smaller and smaller and smaller until they also became Internet devices, then the size of the screen became a serious factor. I think that’s one thing hurting the Blackberries with their fixed keyboards and small screens.
I’m assuming that it was specifically the Hero’s onscreen keyboard that you disliked rather than onscreen keyboards in general (given that the iPhone also uses an onscreen keyboard).
My Droid X came with Swype, which I’ve started using and fell instantly in love with. With Swype you don’t hunt-and-peck around the keyboard - instead, you sweep your finger across the keyboard from letter to letter, only lifting your finger off of the keyboard in between words. Then its internal logic figures out which word best fits your finger-sweeping, correcting for such things as your finger only approximately reaching the right letters. Works amazingly well for me, and surprisingly accurate.
Swype’s web site includes videos both demonstrating the technology (fair warning: those guys are a lot faster at using their technology than I am) and giving tips on how to use it effectively.
(Using Swype is entirely optional - you can continue to use the onscreen keyboard in a “normal” fashion.)
Yes I’m referring specifically to the Hero’s onscreen keyboard. It would invariably choose a letter to the left or right of where the majority of my finger’s press was. I happened to own an ipod while I had the Hero and using the onscreen keyboard on the ipod was a lot more hit than miss. It helped me make the decision to buy an iphone.
I am sure the swype thing is as good as you say it is, but I’d have to actually use it to be convinced. The way you describe it it doesn’t sound like it would be easy to use intuitively.
You can recalibrate the keyboard. It sounds like you either kept approaching the virtual key from a bad angle and selecting a wrong letter or that the keyboard was simply off.
For Droids and other phones with the latest Android OS there is an app called “Touchdown” which is a near clone of exhange
MS Outlook in a mobile format. Free for 30 days and then $ 20 (one time purchase) if you like it. It’s far more sophisticated and customizable than the Androids existing exchange functionality.
I think one of the coolest apps I’ve seen for the Droid is the Google Goggles app. You click on the app, and it activates the camera on the phone. You take a picture of something, and it does a Google search based on the picture. I took a picture of a Leaning Tower of Pisa refrigerator magnet, and it recognized what it was. Developers say that eventually you’ll be able to take pics of leaves on plants to identify them, insects, etc. I thought it was pretty cool.