GPS FTW

As part of my commitment to a happy marriage, I took scuba lessons.  If you know my wife, that completely makes sense to you.  The lessons consisted of two weekends' worth of time allotment.  The first weekend was classroom work (horrible high school flashbacks) and pool work ("we're going to swim horizontally while pretending that we're swimming vertically").  That was the easy bit.  I passed that portion without any problems.  I'm still upset that I got that one wrong on the final test.  Regardless.  The second weekend consisted of what's referred to has "open water dives."  In other words, you're not in the controlled environment of the pool anymore, Toto.

We met early on Saturday morning and divided the group in to the various cars that would be traveling four hours to a quarry.  The quarry used to be a working rock quarry until they dug deep enough to hit a spring and fill the hole up with water.  They then stocked it with fish, sunk some interesting things to look at, and began charging such crazy, extortion-level prices for people (mostly scuba students) to make use of it that the Russian mafia was overheard to have said "that's a steep price."  The trip started mostly uneventful.  Those of us in the minivan were getting to know one another and enjoying scanning the radio for music we enjoyed.  There were five vehicles in the convoy all total.  For those who are wondering, of course I quoted some C.W. McCall as we pulled out of the parking lot.

Later on in the trip, things got a bit more fragmented.  One car missed where the interstate split and were on their own.  Traffic separated the lead van with the other three.  I called the lead van to make sure which route they were taking.  We were only a few miles behind them, but didn't see them again until reaching the quarry.  How does this relate to the Incredible?  With everyone separating, I decided to put the phone to a real-world test.  Battery life to the wind, I turned on the GPS.  It took me a little bit to find the address of the place we were going (Maps was a bit fickle about using the abbreviation for road instead of spelling it out), but soon I had the route planned out before us.

It was a bit more of a scenic route than I initially expected as it took us through the heart of a small town instead of staying on a road that eventually met back up with the road we were on, but the important bit is that it got us there.  I found that when the miles remaining to turn is in the double-digits, it decrements when it reaches four tenths of a mile remaining (e.g. 10.4 appeared as 10), but other than that, it was a perfectly good turn-by-turn direction system.  It fulfilled its purpose of getting us to the quarry and subsequently home.  Isn't that all you want out of a GPS system?

Over the two days we were there, I survived the sub-60 degree water and successfully didn't drown.  I passed the open water portion of the scuba classes and am now a certified open water diver.  The GPS passed a test that makes me feel better about not bringing my mom's Tom-Tom with when we make our anniversary trip, but I still need to get a car charger for the phone before that happens (stupid battery life).

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It's Not You, It's...Well, Mostly It IS You

Most of us have had that relationship that on paper should be great, but there's just something not quite right to us.  When trying to explain it, all we can really settle on is "It's just not working out."  Such has been my experience with doubleTwist.

I had high hopes for doubleTwist.  I had expected it to work for me in a similar manner to how I used iTunes with my iPod Touch.  However, after a week of using the program, it became obvious to me that it just wasn't going to make me happy.  There were too many things that I could point to and mention how it kind of bothered me.  None of these things were huge in and of themselves or what we would call "show stoppers," but they were nagging at me.  The performance was slower than I would have liked.  The podcasts were organized in a way that bothered me.  I had to manually delete the completed podcasts.  Then came the final straw: I provided feedback.  More appropriately, I received a response to feedback I had left in their forums.  The response was basically: "All of these are by design and can't be changed by the user."  I understand that engineers can get a specific work flow stuck in their minds (pot, kettle. kettle, pot), but to not even provide an option to order the podcasts in a way that the user might want? That, to me, is unacceptable.

So starting this week, I cut ties with doubleTwist.  It was an easy move to make at the time because that morning, for whatever reason, my podcasts decided to not sync through. So I listened to my podcasts by directly downloading them to the computer. Then I started looking in to other options.  The first thing that I really looked in to and tried was Google Listen.  It's an app on the phone, but it's also manageable through the Google Reader site.  This accomplishes one of the reasons for using a computer-based syncing option for the podcasts: Making the podcasts discoverable and subscribe-able through something other than the phone itself.  Mobile devices, in my opinion, are great for consuming certain content.  They tend to be less than great for discovering content to be consumed.  Integration with Google Reader lets me subscribe to podcasts through a web interface with a keyboard and a mouse.  Much better.  Listen, by default has one of the same small issues that doubleTwist had: it orders things by default from newest to oldest.  However, at least they provide you with an option to queue the files up in a specific order.  Not ideal, but it works.  I'm hoping that one of the new options I found in Reader will take care of the default case for me.  You're able to organize items there from oldest to newest.  I'll let you know how that turns out.

The app itself isn't perfect yet.  They need to provide play controls at the lock screen so I can pause and re-start the audio without having to unlock the phone and in some cases re-enter the application.  By the way, this is one way in which Android is (at least currently) superior to Apple's mobile OS.  I'm able to run an application in the background and not be locked in to the application as long as I want it to hear it.  Other than that and some small navigation issues (it's not yet immediately obvious to me which screen I need to be at for the different functions I want it to do), it's been working pretty well for me.  I'm able to set options in the app to not download items unless the phone is on wireless (using the home networking as opposed to hitting Verizon) and plugged in (not draining down the battery).  Throughout the day, it will occasionally hit the server to discover if there are any new items forthcoming, but it will wait to download them until the two conditions are met.  A nice solution instead of syncing, in my opinion.

So, that's it, then, doubleTwist.  I suppose I'll only see you again when I have some new purchased/ripped music that I want to be putting on the phone. I'm sure it will be an awkward and uncomfortable five or so minutes. Just like a real relationship.

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On the [Turn Left Now] Road Again

So it turns out that I need a car charger.  Not because I forget to charge or anything.  I can get the full day of battery through normal usage.  This includes listening to podcasts essentially the entire day and several text messages and phone calls (mostly from Tracy) throughout the day.  No, I need the car charger to make sure that I know where I'm going.  That's right, I turned on the GPS.

This weekend I had to drive to my brother-in-law's house to pick up his daughters for a birthday party.  I've driven there twice now but have a horrible memory, so I figured it was a good opportunity to try out the GPS turn-by-turn feature that they added with Android version 2.1.

The instructions that were given by the phone were pretty straight forward and it was very easy to hear and understand the voice.  I wasn't looking at the screen very much (for obvious reasons), but in the few glances that I gave it there was everything you'd expect on a GPS panel: Distance to go, next instruction, which way you're turning, a basic map, etc.

Here's the issue: In the 60 minute round trip, I burned through nearly half my battery.  I know that smart phones, with all of their features, are notorious for going through their battery quickly, but that's ridiculous.  I talked to the folks at the Verizon store and they weren't anticipating an expanded-capacity battery coming out any time soon.  I think people would snatch those up like hot-cakes.  I was also reading comments in a forum where a person was talking about the battery needing to get "broken in."  I was previously unaware that batteries were like a new pair of jeans, but it provides me with a little bit of hope.  As such, I've been unwilling to research if there's any actual truth behind it for fear of having those hopes dashed to the ground.  I'm strange that way.

The main two options for a car charger are the Verizon-sold one that has the permanently-attached cord or a DC adapter that simply has two USB ports on the end.  I would prefer going that route as it's substantially cheaper and would be able to be used with Tracy's phone as well.  The problem there, of course, is the concern that either the phone or the adapter wouldn't follow the USB protocol of asking the device how much power it needs before going to full power.  Basically, I really don't want my phone to explode.

But really, isn't that what we all want out of life?

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Working Out a Workflow

We fear change.

-Garth Algar

Over the past few years, I've had a pretty good work flow for syncing my iPod to the podcasts downloaded to the computer. I would plug in the iPod and wait for the sync, then I would kick off the download of the latest episodes and go to bed. In the morning, I would do another quick sync, unplug my fully-operational battle station...er...fully-charged iPod and be on my way. Some strange fluke of iTunes running and the iPod being plugged in kept the computer from going to sleep/hibernation. After nearly a full week with the Droid Incredible, I'm having to shift that a bit. It seems as though having the phone plugged in to the computer doesn't keep it from going to sleep. This means that in the morning, I wasn't having a fully-charged phone. With the battery life on the phone already much shorter than I would like, this is pretty much unacceptable. As such, I've been having to work out what process of steps I need to take to make sure that I have everything sunk and charged before I walk out the door in the morning.

Basically, I'm having to do more work before I go to bed now. I download the latest podcasts to doubleTwist, then sync my phone. As soon as that is completed, I unplug the phone from the computer and plug it in to its charger.

This might not seem like that huge of a change, but believe me, for me it is a large change. I'm very much a creature of habit. I always do the exact same sequence of steps when I'm in the shower in the morning. I always listen to my new podcasts in the same order. Therefore, changing my workflow, even a little bit, is kind of unsettling for me.

Another note about podcasts, while we're here: It looks as though the default media player doesn't mark the podcasts as played, so as it stands right now, I'm having to manually delete them. Also, they are being duplicated in the playlist for the individual podcasts, so I end up with at least two instances of each episode in the playlist. Hopefully, this doesn't mean that each one is having to be copied multiple times to the phone. That's using up space for no reason whatsoever.

I'm still taking suggestions for a replacement media player.

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One Day Down

One day is in the books now. I was brave and left my iPod at home, making the Droid my only device for the entire day that I was at work. A couple of quick thoughts:

• I need a more podcast-friendly media player. For some reason (don't know if it was doubleTwist or what), my podcasts were all double-copied to the phone. This means that I'm using more space than I need to. Also, the podcasts were in inverse order, so the oldest podcast was at the bottom. The signifigance here is that I will often let several episodes of a show build up and then listen to two or three at a time. With the current order, I have to manually start the next newest episode each time one episode is complete instead of allowing the player to simply cascade to the next. It's possible that's simply a changed setting, but I haven't found it yet.
• I'm concerned about battery life. I followed my normal routine throughout the day and I was at about 60% battery life by about the middle. Granted, other people were playing with the phone to see what it was like and there were more calls than normal because I had to talk to my wife about a few things, but I was a bit worried and shut off the WiFi while I was away from home. I don't want to have a case where I forget to shut off the WiFi and I'm out of battery because I had to search for something on the internet.
• Application interface on doubleTwist isn't exactly what I thought it would be. I had been under the impression that it would work very much like the iTunes app store where I could browse around inside the program for applications that would be sunk to the device the next time they were connected. This appears to not be the case. Instead, you can browse on the doubleTwist website for applications, scan the Q code on the screen with your phone and it gets installed that way. Slightly disappointing to me.
• I have fat fingers. The notification bar at the top of the screen is a bit hard for me to hit because you have to press and hold and the phone keeps interpreting that action as me wanting to grab the large clock on the home screen. This is a bit frustrating. Hopefully there's some form of setting where I can adjust the width of that bar. Otherwise, I might have to remove the large clock, which is doable but not preferable.
• I want to be able adjust the behavior of the optical track pad button. I'll admit it: I'm used to how the iPod/iPhone software handles the round button on the front of the device. I want to be able to click on it to wake it if it was sleeping; click to take me to the home screen; and double click to bring up the media controls. This is how I expect it to behave. Again, I'm hoping to be able to dig around in the settings.
• It's not immediately intuitive to me how applications keep running when I leave them. Is it something that I just have to get used to or will I need to change my workflow to use an application killer program to periodically go through and terminate the applications that I don't want to be running?
• The one and only feature that I miss from my previous phone is that I could close it to end a call. That's it. I just have to get my muscles used to ending a call in a different way.

All things considered, these are pretty minor nits. I'm very impressed by how smooth the phone is when scrolling from screen to screen or launching an application. The call quality is great and the voice search feature, once I get used to it, will come in tremendously helpful. The way humans work, though, is that it's the negative things that stick out. Overall, I'm very happy with the phone so far.

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