Posts Tagged smartphone apps

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.