Posts Tagged android
Motorola Atrix Smart Phone: Small Cost, Big Features
When I finally broke down and got a smart phone upon returning from living in Mexico for a year, two of my traits made me get this Motorola Atrix Android phone instead of an iPhone.
1) I’m a value shopper at heart and 2) I’ve always rebelled against doing something just because it’s the popular thing to do. I didn’t want to be one of the iSheep.
I’ve got an iPod Touch and except for the horrible battery life, I like it. So I’m able to do a reasonably fair comparison. I’m totally digging this Atrix phone and here’s why.
The Price is Right
Without any special discounts, you can usually get the Motorola Atrix for $79 to $99 with an AT&T contract. I paid $49 because of a promotion running. So I essentially got a 4G, dual-core smartphone that does everything an iPhone does, with 16GB of storage to start with and the ability to add 32GB more any time, for 1/4 the price of an 16GB iPhone. I can also pull up Flash websites with ease—a huge plus. The music player can handle Apple files AND regular MP3 or WMA files.
Features Galore
For that $49 I got a smartphone with front and back 5 megapixel camera that shoots HD video. I’ve got Wi-Fi, 4G, and access to all my different e-mail accounts. It uses micro USB to connect to the charger and computer, which is not proprietary. (The phone comes with a USB cord and a charger attachment, plus an HDMI cable to connect to hi-def TVs.) There’s a speaker phone that works great in the car and Bluetooth connection ability of course. I can make any song a ringtone by just selecting “make this my ringtone.” Nice and easy.
Every important regular-usage app I have on my iPod Touch I’ve been able to get for this from the Android store. So I’m a ready traveler with dictionaries, currency converters, maps, flight searches, and all that. For those who want to document their life as it happens, you can put on Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite, Foursquare, and whatever flavor of the month is bubbling up. Shazaam, Yelp, Evernote, and all the other cool apps that can make this a real multitasker. With the Skype app on here, calls that come to my Skype subscription number ring on this phone, wherever I am, with a different ring tone.
The screen is gorgeous and the interface works well. I find it a little easier to type on this than my Touch, probably because it’s a tad bigger and there is a vibration for each letter typed. It offers word suggestions you can click on, but doesn’t automatically do text correction—thankfully. There’s a fingerprint recognition function built in to turn it on, but I haven’t used that because sometimes my wife needs to answer my phone for me if I’m in the other room or in the shower. Speaking of using the phone, the dailpad is turned off when you’re talking, but a sensor can tell when you’ve removed the phone from your ear and need to punch the dialpad or hang up. Almost like magic.
Perhaps the most important advantage this has over the iPhone for many people will be a battery life that’s far superior. Without any significant conservation commands in place, I generally get two days out of this phone before I have to charge it. The worst I’ve gotten is 16 hours after playing a bunch of games for a stretch and pulling up a map while I was driving. That’s a huge improvement.
What’s the downside?
Even the most staunch Apple haters have to admit that the company is tops when it comes to ease of use. The Android interface may be logical, but it isn’t nearly as intuitive. There are surely ways to customize it to have what I use most front and center, but I need to look at a manual to figure out how. The Motoblur function overdoes it when importing your contacts and throws your Twitter and Facebook ones in with your phone contacts and e-mail ones, creating a big overwhelming mess of people. Getting rid of them is not so easy. There are some functions I haven’t figured out yet and others I’ve stumbled upon by accident.
There are a few games and destination apps that are not available for Andriod, which could matter to some people. Most will just find an alternative though. You’re not integrated with your iTunes collection with this phone, but it’s very easy to import from there.
Overall, I consider this Motorola Atrix to be about the best bargain I’ve gotten all year. I was going to sign up for a new 2-year plan anyway, so getting a smart phone with this much power and this many features for this price is fantastic. Sorry Apple—advantage Android on this deal, by a wide margin.
See the long list of features and specs at the Motorola site.
Posted by Tim L. in Business Gear, General Gear on August 11th, 2011
iHound app for lost or stolen smart phones
As a busy traveler, I have lots of things to keep up with when on the road, and in today’s connected world, my iPhone is always in my hand. When deplaning or leaving a hotel room in a rush, it is easy to set it down while collecting other things and leave it behind. Let’s just say I have done that a few too many times. After the ordeal of begging the Apple store to let me buy another iPhone at full price (and being refused by the manager to buy another even at full price…imagine that, a company refusing to take your money for the full retail price of an item), I realized I needed a better plan to protect me against my own carelessness. Apple has no insurance for the iPhone rather an annual fee of almost $100) for its MobileMe recovery service. Such a high fee for a product that is already costly did not seem right, so I set about to find an alternative.
I discovered iHound software, which is an affordable app (only $3.99 for three months or $3.99 for a year for Android). It runs constantly in the background using the GPS software in your smartphone helping you to locate your phone on their web site if it is lost or stolen. You can also send a message to appear on the screen of the phone or sound a siren (or even an authoritative voice message) via a push notification so that you can locate it more easily.
The company has been in business for almost four years and provides an affordable way to track your phone in case it is lost or stolen. It works with iPhones, the iPod touch, and Android. There is even a way to easily gather information about your phone via the iHound web site to prepare a police report if needed. The app can be purchased via the iTunes store with payments possible via PayPal.
Special stickers are also available for purchase to put directly on the phone giving a protected form of contact for someone to reach you if it is found.
While the app does not require a wifi signal to work, it does need to have cell phone connectivity to be located via GPS. When wifi is available, it can also connect via wifi automatically. Save yourself the hassle of paying hefty annual fees and buy this affordable peace of mind. It has certainly saved me more than a few times!
Posted by Ramsey in Business Gear, Travel Light on May 2nd, 2011
DROID ERIS by HTC Smartphone
Here’s my disclaimer right off the bat: I’m a relatively new smartphone adapter. I just got a Blackberry in the fall of 2009. I don’t regularly review “tech” items; I leave that to my in-the-know colleague John, who is great at writing about phones, apps and netbooks. (Me? I dig covering cute capris and flip flops.) Generally speaking, I’m a luddite — though my mom thinks I’m a tech genius since I know how to upload photos to Shutterfly. (It’s all relative.)
That all said, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to check out a touch-screen phone with the Google Android operating system — specifically, the DROID ERIS by HTC. This phone is really, really cool — it’s got some amazing capabilities and personalizing features. It syncs with your Google and Facebook accounts with the press of a button — all of your Gmail contacts are instantly loaded. You can share images you’ve taken with the phone’s camera to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Picasa easily — it really connects beautifully with the major social networks out there. It organizes all of your “communications” with each of your contacts by person — so you have a running log of all phone calls, texts and Facebook interactions with each of your friends.
But what I found after using this amazingly capable smart phone is that I don’t need all these bells and whistles. When I’m traveling — whether it’s to a foreign country or down the road to the grocery store — all I really want is to have instant access to a phone and email. (Twitter is a distant third requirement.)
I don’t need the thousands of nifty applications available via the Android Market, even though there are some silly games that my young kids downloaded that kept them occupied on a recent road trip. There are hundreds of free apps in the “Travel” category, from hotel finders to NYC subway maps to English-Spanish dictionaries, but none are “must have” items for my phone. I’ve gotten along without them for years; I really don’t need them now.
And I really missed the button keyboard on my Blackberry. After three weeks of using a touch-screen keyboard–even with its “word prediction” and “spell correction” — I think I’m a much more accurate typist on my not-near-as-sleek Blackberry Tour.
Here are a few more observations — and I do recognize that it’s apples to oranges when I compare the DROID ERIS to my Blackberry, but, hey, it’s all I know.
The DROID ERIS is super-slim and attractive. I love how it feels in my hands. The home-screen graphics are crisp and clean and downright cute. (The little, green, droid alien guy appears when you power on and off and it’s on the Android Market widget.)
Set up is easy. I have always had my husband deal with calling our phone provider (Verizon Wireless) to set up new cell phones. But I insisted on doing this one, and it was painless. Syncing my Twitter, Facebook and Gmail accounts was a piece of cake with step-by-step visual cues.
You can personalize seven home screens. I fit all of my must-have widgets and contacts on one screen, but for users who are in constant contact with several friends, you can load their info in a easy-access widget and store it on one screen you might use for “play.” Store work contacts on your “work” screen. Put the kids’ favorite game apps on another screen. Put your web browser — if you use it frequently — on the other. You get my drift. You can really customize your phone the way you like to use it.
The Twitter application, Peep, failed a lot. As I mentioned above, I use my smartphone to make calls, check email and send Twitter updates. So it was a bummer when I often got fail messages. I also prefer Blackberry’s Ubertwitter to the Droid’s Peep. In Ubertwitter, you can scroll over (via the trackball) to a URL and it will take you to the site via the phone’s web browser; in Peep, you have to touch the screen “just right” to get a URL to work. I also never figured out how to search Twitter in Peep; in Ubertwitter it’s more obvious how to do that.
You have to charge the DROID ERIS nightly. I ran out of battery power if I was away from my home office most of the day and checking email frequently, or my kids were running down the battery playing games on the phone. I just don’t have that kind of battery drain with my Blackberry. On the DROID ERIS, the screen goes black to save battery power after mere seconds; annoying if you’re checking email a lot (like I do).
In the end, I really don’t think I’ll miss my sample DROID ERIS after I send it back to the manufacturer next week. I’m so glad I now understand what it’s like to use a touch-screen Droid phone with incredible social capabilities, but I’m fine with returning to what I think is a simpler phone, for my simple smartphone ways. My children, however, think differently — they’ll miss the Snake, Guitar Hero and Light Racer 3D game apps they’ve been playing for weeks.
The DROID ERIS is currently solely for Verizon Wireless customers. It’s $99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with new two-year customer agreement. Buy at Verizon Wireless stores or online.
Posted by Kara in General Gear on February 26th, 2010
