I finally decided to upgrade from my Droid Incredible. I had that phone for over three years and it took a long time for me to finally decide to upgrade. It was the best phone I had in my entire life and I do miss it. However it got slow and had quite a few bugs…
Anyway, this blog post is my review of my new phone; the Motorola Droid Razr HD. I decided to go with the middle child of the Razr’s… it’s between the regular Droid Razr and Droid Razr HD Maxx. I was back and forth on phones at first… I was between the Razr, Razr Maxx, Galaxy S III, and the new HTC Droid Incredible.
So I’ve had this new one for about a week now. It’s pretty cool so far. Having the Incredible first helped. The learning curve was very little. I was able to figure out stuff pretty quick.
The tricky thing was getting my apps onto the new phone, which was why I was hesitant to upgrade in the first place. I actually put an ad on Craigslist for porting over the progress in my one app, Paradise Island. After hooking up with this one cool guy, he was able to root my husbands old Droid Incredible and his new phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note II… he was able to get his progress in his island… After I got my new phone I hooked up with him again and rooted my old and new phone and was able to port over my island.
Anyway, on to cool stuff:
- Basically everything my old phone (Droid Incredible) had that was cool.
- It has unlimited number of “pages” (desktop screens). They are always to the right. To the left is phone management and settings.
- The GPS (Google Maps) is awesome. It loads right away unlike my old phone. It takes a few seconds to get your location and destination.
- I have three browsers: Chrome (came with the phone), FireFox, and Dolphin. I could download these on my old phone but they’re awesome on my new one.
- It’s a bigger screen.
- I can unlock and go right to text message, wherever I was before, phone, or camera… no waiting.
- Front facing camera.
- It’s light weight and durable.
- It always has phone, people, apps, text, and camera.
- The user community is amazing. I can google any question I have and someone has run into the same issue and has a solution.
- BATTERY LIFE IS AMAZING SO FAR. So glad I didn’t get the Maxx. I can already not put my phone on the charger for two days and be perfectly fine.
- It tracks data use and you can turn off Mobile data.
- Loud ring tone. Which is a great and bad thing. At work I need to put it on vibrate since the lowest level of volume is a bit loud.
- Movie quality is amazing. Youtube videos look awesome.
- My emails look amazing since it does HTML email… however it still doesn’t load copy & pasted images. It also creates a vertical scroll sometimes depending on the message.
- Internet speed is awesome since it’s 4G LTE.
- The speakers are loud! This is really good for getting calls or watching video in semi-loud places. You can actually hear it!
Not So Cool:
- The email client isn’t the easiest to understand. In fact, I don’t even know how to get to drafts yet. And the settings are hard to find and understand.
- The settings in general are kinda hard to understand at first.
- Connecting it to the computer the first time didn’t work. It wanted to install this Motorola software that ended up not working. Since I got the phone rooted, it comes up as two drives, which is exactly what I want and expect.
- The weather thing didn’t work until I added a city to it.
- Connecting to WiFi was a lot easier with my old phone. I didn’t need to know the Security thing.
- There’s no way to clear all in your notifications.
- I can’t get Skype to work (which is a problem with Skype and not the phone)… I need to figure out better video conference software… anyone have any suggestions?
- The calendar isn’t as easy as it was in my old phone.
- Not sure how to change my avatar on texts yet.
- Desktop still doesn’t rotate.
- The keyboard doesn’t have the quick keys on the asdfghjkl; like it did on my old phone. It’s taking some getting used to and I need to hit space then backspace to add a period/question mark after my sentence.
Now I have my phone rooted… I still need to figure out cool things I can do with that. I also have an app that should keep the root should I decide to upgrade to the next version of Android.
But all in all I’m loving the new phone so far. Everything’s fast. My island is doing well. It’s good. I’d give the phone 9/10.
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for quite some time. You ever just think about life or be in a situation where technology just lacks? And you think to yourself, why haven’t they done that or fixed that?
I have been in these situations quite a few times throughout the years and I have to say each time… It’s the year 2011!
Here’s a list of stuff that needs to just catch up…
- Vending machines – Take my stupid, folded up, ripped, and wrinkled dollar… in ANY direction. Why should I still need to have that crisp, perfect, straight from the mint dollar bill in order to get my soda???
- Toll Roads – Yes, they have EZ pass and that’s great. But what about the people who don’t have EZ pass and carry around credit cards? What about instances when it’s 3 in the morning and there’s no dudes there? I still need to have the exact change to put in the thing. (I’m looking at you, VA-267.)
- Digital Radio – Why aren’t all stereos in cars digital? And how come when they are, they’re always so delayed it displays the song name three songs later? And why does it take forever to scroll and see what the station name is?
- Crutches – Why haven’t we come up with something more advanced than crutches? They make your life hard. I don’t understand why they don’t come up with an iron boot or something so you can walk without those awful things under your arms.
- Food – How come it’s the future and we still have fattening food? How come we don’t have food that tastes good and that is good? And why the hell is fruit so expensive? Furthermore, shouldn’t all food be available 365 days a year? Why do I need to wait for my strawberries and zucchini to be in season?
- 24/7 – How rare is it that any place is open 24 hours? It’s the future. Almost all places should be 24/7 including BANKS. I hate time limits on food and clothing and shopping.
- Hoverboard – Because I had to put it in here!
- Baldness & Other Cures – Shouldn’t we have cures for obvious things? There should be no bald people. You shouldn’t have to take a few days to get better from a cold. There should be easy solutions to these problems.
- Simulation – How come you have to learn how to ride a bike the same way people learned 100 years ago? When learning to ride a motorcycle or a manual car, it’s real. How come there’s no simulated thing that you could easily learn how to shift? They had simulations for the space shuttle back before 1969! Why do I need to learn by really doing it?
- Automatic Transmissions – Why is it that everything isn’t automatic? It’s the future, you know. We should get away from this “manual” because we invented machines to do it for us. And they can do it better than us. Why do more when a machine can do it for you?
- Pennies – How come in the US we still have pennies? Inflation is so high right now, there isn’t a need. Our country can’t afford to make them anyway. Making a penny costs two cents, which makes no sense.
- Shoe Laces – Why do we still have these again? Isn’t the future supposed to be shoes that adjust to your feet? You shouldn’t have to manually adjust your shoes to fit.
- Pens – Is it so much to ask for a pen to actually work? Sure if you buy the really expensive pens, maybe. But this is the future. All pens should work without you having to draw 2,139,482 circles to get more ink or putting a lighter to the tip to melt the dried ink. Work!
- Lights On – Why isn’t it a requirement for cars to have their lights on when the windshield wipers are on. It’s a law in some states. Some cars do it but it should be a requirement.
- Lasting Batteries – Why do we have problems with charging things? It’s the year 2011. I’d expect our devices to run by themselves without a charge or have little requirement for charge. My phone needs to be placed on the charger like once every 15 hours (depending on usage). Seriously, create better batteries.
- Doors – Isn’t there a way to digitalize the doors already? Make it use a fingerprint or something or a card. Keys are so old and they’re so bulky!
- Adapters – Why is it that I need 3,428 different cords to power my different electronic devices? Why isn’t just one adapter fits all? (Thanks to @travey for this one.)
I asked Bing why it wasn’t XHTML 1.0 compliant and this is what it said:
Sounds like what you’d expect from a search engine made by Microsoft. Begs the question of how Bing is any better than Google or Yahoo? FAIL.
I’ve been playing around with the Incredible for about a week now. I got it earlier than it was released and got a pretty sweet deal (two Incredible’s for around $300). I signed another 2 year deal with Verizon for 700 minutes, unlimited text, unlimited data, etc for about $180/month for two phones.
I took pictures of everything on my flickr.
After having it for a week, I have to say, this phone does rock. Here’s a list of stuff that’s cool and what’s not.
Cool Stuff:
- Android Market has tones of apps. Pretty easy to use interface too.
- It’s FAST. I mean FAST. It’s probably faster than my internet connection at work.
- It knows which direction I’m facing! It’s that precise.
- The traffic on Google Maps is awesome. It has like all the roads, even the Pike and 28! You can also zoom in and out with your fingers. It also has satellite view.
- It got a lot of information from Facebook. Once it recognized the name, I was able to port over their information (even their avatar) on my phone.
- The camera is pretty cool. Here’s a picture I took: Dimitri At His Desk
- The five desktop screens. I’m worried I’m going to run out of room for my shortcuts and widgets.
- The desktops are cool. I have mine set on a phone one with water that I can tap. There are lots more downloadable on the Android Market.
- The GPS on this thing is AMAZING. As you’ll read, I have a compass app which pinpoints my precise location. It also knows what direction I’m facing. I’ll never be lost again.
- The browser is pretty brilliant. You can zoom in and out with your fingers. It resizes everything for easy viewing.
- The icon on the top shows new messages and emails, which is nice.
- It has a pretty loud ringer. That’s what I hated about the Voyager, it was too soft.
- It’s light weight. It’s lighter than the Voyager. It fits naturally in your pocket and hands.
- Getting and placing calls takes getting used to. If your face isn’t near your phone during a call, it recognizes that and it pops up a screen with talk time, end call button, and phone pad. It also says what city the phone is registered on on Caller ID.
- Good software to read pdf, doc, xls is really good. I wouldn’t want to write a paper on the phone but I probably could.
- The app Note Everything, saves stuff to the card so I can easily get it from the phone via USB or card reader.
- I can easily send more than 1 picture at a time.
- Of course, multitasking!
Not So Cool:
- I can’t figure out how to pull up my contacts while in a phone conversation. I needed to yesterday. I had to hang up, pull up the number, then text it.
- If you have your mail sync with your phone, if you send or delete a message, it won’t save it in Yahoo Mail. It doesn’t put the message in the trash upon delete and there’s nothing in my sent folder in Yahoo from any email I sent with the phone.
- I haven’t figured out a way (I don’t think there is one) to save individual texts. It has it in a long conversation, which is nice since you can see what was said, but I can’t delete individual texts, I’d have to delete the entire conversation.
- Android Market has a lot of repeat apps… they may have over 50,000 but how many of them are actually unique?
- Some of the cooler apps cost money where as online they are free.
- The FaceBook App needs some work. It limits what I can view on people’s profiles. Nor does it have events yet. It would be cool if it automatically put events in your calendar.
- Maybe I just haven’t figured it out yet, but the Google Maps needs a layer for gas stations and food and stuff.
- Maybe it’s a bug in the widget but it doesn’t show the sun until around 11AM on my phone… it’s still the moon.
- It asks for birthdays in my contacts, but it doesn’t notify me of birthdays or anything, so that’s pretty useless.
- The keyboard is quirky and takes some getting used to. I added a few words that weren’t words and I’m not sure how to delete them from the library. I (as well as Brian) often does a “.” instead of a space. I miss the Voyager full qwerty keyboard with actual buttons.
- Not all apps rotate when you turn the phone. The desktop doesn’t even rotate. YouTube videos have to be viewed horizontally.
- I couldn’t figure out the camera at first. I didn’t know how to take a picture. Then I tried the bottom button, and that worked. That’s the only thing I use that button for. You can use it to maneuver screens but it goes in the opposite direction you’d expect.
- Battery life isn’t so great. But if you get the Task Killer app, that saves a lot. Before I had that, my battery would barely last a day. Now it lasts until I put it on the charger at night.
- Figuring out the ringer is kind of annoying. It only has three modes (which are called profiles): Normal, Vibrate, and silent.
Apps I Downloaded:
- 10001 Cocktails (Which came in handy in OC… I looked up some drinks and ordered them. The bartender was impressed!)
- Advanced Task Killer Free (A must! You have to get this in order to close your apps. If not, your apps will run in the background sucking up resources and batteries.)
- Air Horn (To make as much noise as we can!)
- Bubbles (Just a goofy application to create bubbles and pop them.)
- Compass (VERY precise. Gives you longitude and latitude as well as the address of where you are. It identifies EXACTLY where I am.)
- DrunkBlocker (So I don’t accidentally call people when I’m drunk.)
- FlashLight (Pretty cool, so you can see where you’re going.)
- Google Sky Map (Awesome app!)
- MeetroDC (So I know when the next trains are coming.)
- Moon Phase (Tells what phase the moon is in and when the next full moon is.)
- Note Everything (A notepad kind of thing which also has a white board.)
- Shazam (To identify songs.)
- Twidroid (For Twitter.)
- Urbanspoon
Basically, the phone is awesome. Totally worth it. It took a lot of getting used to. It took Brian an hour to figure out how to get my ring tones and it took a long time to figure out how to customize the desktops. I’d give the phone an 8.5/10.
