So it's been over two months since I last posted here. Since then, some things have changed. In no particular order, I've graduated from RPI with a bachelor's in Computer Science, started employment at Kitware, improved my Vim-fu (for later posts), migrated from using screen to tmux, turned 21, and got myself a Droid Incredible.
This post will focus on the Droid part, I have a list of things I'd like to write about here for later as well.
I've been happy with the phone since I got it at the end of June. It came with Android 2.1 and should get Froyo by the end of the year if all goes well. It has its pros and cons, as with any device. I wish I could find a case for it like my friend has for her Nexus One that is made of neoprene to hold it. Unfortunately the only case I found that I liked is a rubber-like material which is nice, but it leaves the screen exposed all the time which can be annoying. Other than that, the hardware is great. My previous phone was a baseline Nokia flip phone so I don't really have the experience to compare it to other smartphones.
Some of the workings of the phone are a little wonky to me. I wish that apps that require GPS to locate my location had an option to turn it on long enough to get it and then turn the GPS back off once the location was attained. It's a huge power drain and usually I care just enough to find my location on the Maps application and then navigate myself from there with directions instead of using the Navigation application. When switching between 3G and wireless, if I have it set that I don't care about unencrypted networks and I leave connectivity with my home router, the wireless can be turned off. Even if it did stay on, it doesn't automatically reconnect when I get back home (turning it off then back on is the quickest way to get it back when it disconnects, I've found), so that's more wasted power there.
With software, it's a mixed bag. I've yet to find a suitable MPD client to act as a remote control at home. I'm using BitMPC now, but it's still pretty slow, sometimes fails to display the current song, the controls don't come up, and other issues. I tried two others I found but they were even slower with the amount of songs in the playlist and library and I don't even have what is considered a large collection these days.
The games are alright. Enough to keep me interested when waiting around, but nothing I'd cry over if I didn't have access to them.
The built-in Gmail application is crap. I have it sync (manually since I'd like to keep activity down when I don't care, such as when I have mutt available) and it tells me I have new messages and fails to actually display them. The only way to get them, I found, is to hope the next sync gets new messages or clear out all data for it. I don't think I'd ever end up using an email client on the phone seriously anyways. All the ones I've seen top post by default and don't have options which makes it useless to me since that's not something I should have to fix by clicking under the text to reply.
For identi.ca, mustard is fine. Nothing spectacular, but also not a Twitter client which happens to be a status.net client which gives it points in my book.
For a browser, I use xScope Lite. I find that zooming with a double tap and slide is much better than a pinch gesture. I wish it were universal on the phone. I like it more than the built-in Browser, but it handles Flash miserably (which is fine as far as ads go, but for things like YouTube (I use youtube-dl on the desktop since they lack Flash as well) it's annoying. Speaking of YouTube, the app loves to not pause a video and instead restart it from the beginning if you leave to do something else. So while the video is loading, you're stuck there waiting. This seems, to me, like something that can be backgrounded and send out a notification when it's ready.
The bloatware that came with the phone really needs to go. There are some free trials that came with it that I can't remove even though I could care less about them. The CityID tool is one of them. It has a per-month usage fee and it's really not worth it for me.
Overall, I'm happy to have a smartphone. It's not something that I'd put in my "must have" category of gadgets though. Something in the always-on category is nice, but something a little lighter on the gimmicky stuff would do a lot better in my book. We'll see what's available when I can upgrade this in a little over a year.