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.