Productive Organizer

Here is an interesting post from Ed Bott. Makes a lot of sense really.

I had my HTC Desire for 1 month and while I can safely say, whatever you can do on the iPhone 4 you can do it on this phone, its more powerful than the iPhone yet I like my iPod Touch More for a lot of reasons:

1. No great battery drain
2. no heat build up
3. No need to kill applications
4. Its intuitive.

Perhaps Android is really missing the point. Most of the applications you see reviewed on MakeUseOf, LifeHacker and the likes, is to list the top applications is to:

1. Kill Tasks
2. Monitor the phone
3. Automate the phone

Why do we need to focus on such things and should instead be talking about essential applications like wordprocessing, cooking and watching tv:

I wanted to love the Droid X. I really did. The specs are awesome, and it got rave reviews from friends and colleagues, who overwhelmingly recommended it as the best of the Android phones. Even Paul Thurrott enthused about his Droid X, calling it “hands-down superior to anything designed in Cupertino.” So I picked one up from Verizon, secure in the knowledge that I had 30 days to decide whether to keep it or send it back.

Initially, I found a lot to like about this device. But two full weeks of carrying it around the Western U.S. on an assortment of business and pleasure trips was enough for me to decide, with no hesitation, that for me, Droid doesn’t cut it.

What went wrong?

Initially, at least, I was seduced by the device—or, more accurately, by Verizon’s network, which actually works in my office. That’s a pleasant and striking contrast to AT&T, whose signal doesn’t penetrate to my home office at all and only reaches about half a bar on the other side of the house. My wife, who loves her iPhone 3GS, has learned that the best way to make it through an entire conversation on the iPhone is to sit in one spot on the couch and try not to move around too much. If I could use it in my office, the iPhone might be an option, but I can’t, so it isn’t.

Update: A commenter asks why I don’t just get an AT&T MicroCell, which connects to the local WiFi network to send and receive phone calls. I tried it earlier this year, but unfortunately, the layout of our home doesn’t allow the signal to reach both the office and the living areas at the same time. In addition, it adds $20 a month to the already high phone bill. So it’s a nonstarter.

Eventually, though, the novelty of being able to use a mobile phone to actually make phone calls wore off, and I had a chance to evaluate this device and the rest of the Android platform on its merits. And that’s where things began to fall apart.

For starters, I realized the device was just too big for my taste. That big, bright, high-resolution screen is part of its appeal, but it also makes it awkward to stash in a side pocket and a little too big to fit comfortably in a shirt pocket.

And although the Droid X is impressively fast at most tasks, it pays a familiar price for that performance, generating a level of heat that I found literally uncomfortable. It wasn’t hot enough to fry an egg, but on more than one occasion I flinched when I touched the back of the device.

Whatever it was doing with the CPU was having an impact on battery life as well, because I had a hard time getting through a working day (much less from sunup to sundown on a long midsummer day) before the battery died. Generally, I found that it would quit before the nine-hour mark, which simply isn’t acceptable for business travel. Using the turn-by-turn GPS seemed to be a particularly big power gobbler. This was particularly inconvenient on one extended driving trip, where the Droid battery conked out about a half-hour before we reached our destination, and we had to use a backup phone to call for directions.

I’m sure I could have figured out how to squeeze more battery life out of the Droid by tweaking its settings, but just finding those settings was what finally sent me over the edge. The Android OS, at least as customized by Verizon on this device, had dozens of icons spread out over seven screens. Some were part of the OS, some were third-party apps, and the whole thing looked like it had been designed by a committee of mad scientists.

The first app I downloaded was a Task Killer, which I used to shut down all of the running apps (more than 20) that were starting by default on this phone, including Skype, which I don’t use. But within a minute or two, all of those apps restarted themselves. Gee, thanks, Verizon.

Ultimately, what unsold me on the Droid X in particular and on the Android platform in general was its complexity. I understand why geeks love this OS. Like Linux, it’s a tweaker’s playground. I’m sure I could have solved all my problems by rooting the device, downloading a new kernel, and starting from scratch.

But the last thing I want is a device that requires constant babysitting.

So, after spending a few hours trying to figure out how to make everything make sense, I surrendered, packed the whole thing up, and shipped it back.

And the search continues.

It turns out that this might be the new trend where the bootloader gets encrypted and you cannot hack it

From Android Guys:

One of of the best Droid developers in the game, Stephen Bird, recently  had a chance to dig into the Droid X system dump and confirmed what many of us had feared.  Yes, that’s right, the Droid X is locked down Motorola Milestone style, locked bootloader and all.  In fact, it is the same encryption that is locking the Droid X bootloader that is locking the Motorola Milestone bootloader.

So, what exactly does this mean? Well, basically there is a good chance that developers will get root access, but custom ROMs will be damn near impossible. Milestone developers have been hacking the encryption for over 6 months now and have come up with very little. Custom ROMs probably will not happen I am sorry to say.

Custom Roms like Cyanogen and SuperD have been giving old phones like HTC Dream, Magic and Hero that runs on weaker processor a new lease of life.

The latests Android Versions like Éclair and Froyo is not official released on these older Android phones but take a look at what Custom Roms can do to a old weak HTC Dream G1:

With this in mind, if an Android is unhackable, how would this affect the Android Ecosystem?

Well what I predict is that the handset manufacturers need to consider this carefully. If they do what Motorola did, they will be screwing themselves over.

The Manufacturers who allows this will likely be viewed as the most popular phone.

Motorola possibly screwing themselves up all over again.

Billshrink gave us a comparison of how much it will cost you in total if you chose to buy the Droid over the Palm Pre and iPhone. Well it turned out that the comparison actually showed them to be pretty much the same!