CrunchGear has a brief reminder about GPS security. It’s a widely applicable reminder, but especially so during the holidays as it gets darker earlier (easier to commit crimes in the dark), and people are out buying GPS units for their friends and family.
Basically, the gist of it is that if you program your GPS with your home address and keep your garage door opener in your car, it presents thieves with the perfect set of tools to rob you.
Their recommended workaround is that you program your “Home” location as somewhere near your home, but sufficiently far away that a thief wouldn’t be able to open your garage door from there, e.g., the McDonald’s or gas station around the corner from your house.
Sounds like good advice to me. Let the user beware…
I’ve had the Motorola Droid for about a week now (I bought it on Black Friday), so it’s about time I posted some initial impressions. I’ll follow this up with more details later.
Overall, I like it a lot. I think it’s a great device, and it’s light years ahead of the Blackberry Tour and Storm I had back in July and September.
Pros:
- Nice, big, bright LCD screen. It’s got a 3.7” touch screen, and at 480×854 it has the highest resolution of any smartphone I know. It’s certainly higher than the iPhone at 480×320, and the Tour and Storm which both weigh in at 480×360.
- Amazing integration with Google Applications: Gmail, Gmail Contacts, Google Calendar, etc. I just entered my Google Account username and password, and it automatically synced all of my mail, contacts, and appointments.
- Ringtones, alarms, notifications, etc. can all be created from MP3, WAV, or AAC files.
- It’s nice to have both a physical and a virtual keyboard.
- Google Navigation is amazing.
- Voice search works very well and is contextual.
- The Shortcuts and Widgets feature is pretty cool. I like that I can do a direct dial right on the home screen to anyone I choose. (As you might expect, Charlene is right there in the corner.)
- The browser is very good. Right up there with the iPhone, if not perhaps a bit better. It’s certainly better than any Blackberry browser I’ve used.
- The hardware is fast. Faster than the iPhone 3G (I don’t have a 3GS to test against), and faster than the Blackberries. The screen refreshes very quickly, and both keyboards are fast. They don’t leave me waiting like the iPhone does.
- The network is fast. Dragging my finger around a map doesn’t leave me hanging as I wait for the map to reload. Pages load faster over WiFi than they do on the iPhone. Using the Speedtest app at home on WiFi I was able to get download speeds of 5 mbps and upload speeds of 2mbps with a 45ms ping. Even on 3G, I got 2172kbps/701kbps with a 99ms ping the other night.
Ambivalent:
- Pattern security works, but is overly sensitive.
- The Android Market is still relatively sparse. It doesn’t have a few of my favorite iPhone apps like Dropbox, WordPress, and Gasbag, but I figure it’s only a matter of time before the developers migrate to Android. Of course, the other way to look at it is there’s plenty of room for up-and-coming developers to fill those voids with their own products.
- I haven’t figured out a way to organize the applications on screen. It appears that they are organized in alphabetical order, but unlike Blackberry, I don’t believe there’s a way to relegate unused icons to a folder or hide them. Maybe it’s just my own ignorance.
- Battery life is just OK. I go about a day between charges.
- It auto-imports everything from Google. This is good and bad. It’s super convenient, but if I didn’t want everything imported, it’s a pain to undo.
Cons:
- At night, the LCD is almost too bright, even at the lowest brightness setting, so I wish it went down a few more gradations. I’m not sure if this is a hardware or a software issue.
- The phone is prone to locking itself, and the only resolution is a hard reset.
- When viewing e-mail in the Gmail app, there are three big buttons on the bottom for “Archive”, “Delete”, and “Older.” I wish those were buried in a menu or customizable. I don’t use Gmail’s Archive function (maybe I should?), so that button is really unnecessary for me. On more than one occasion I’ve unknowingly hit the Archive button and wondered where an e-mail disappeared to.
- No “Alarm Only” mode.
Those are my first impressions of the Droid. If you have one, what do you think?
Happy Birthday to my wonderful, beautiful wife!
Charlene and I went to see The Blind Side on Saturday. This post is on my thoughts about the movie. I hate to over-inflate other people’s expectations by incessantly extolling the virtues of any given movie, so unless you’ve already seen the movie this should suffice: You should go see it.
Otherwise, click to read more.
Read more…
