My First Week With the Droid 4
November 01, 2012
(I meant to post this a few weeks ago, but travel and work commitments have gotten the better of my schedule. Oh yeah, and a car accident, but more on that later...)
Last week my Droid 2 started freaking out pretty badly, so I took this opportunity to upgrade to the Droid 4. When it comes to smartphones, I'm a QWERTY keyboard kind of guy (and love various other things about Droid phones) so this was the logical upgrade path for me...
First Impressions
The Droid 4 is noticeably faster and has a smoother response, which I expected, given the faster processor (the UI is a bit cleaner too). Lots of apps on my Droid 2 felt sluggish and unresponsive at times (and I'm usually the last guy to complain about such things). Everything on the Droid 4 has less lag time and the 4G connection is a noticeable improvement (I don't do much in terms of streaming audio/video, mostly just day to day productivity apps and a few games).
With my old Droid 2, over the last few months, it would lose the data connection periodically. I was never able to pin down a particular reason why this was happening; sometimes it'd only come back if I rebooted the phone. The Droid 4 started doing this too, and if I wasn't also on a wifi connection, I just had to wait for data to come back up. (I later learned this was a bug in the OS, which was fixed when I "upgraded" to the Ice Cream Sandwich OS...more on that later...)
Battery life is noticeably worse with the Droid 4. For the Droid 2, I bought the "extended battery", which allowed me to keep a charge for around 12 hours of regular usage. (It continues to baffle me that smartphone battery life can't get any better, but that's a separate discussion.) I asked about the extended battery for Droid 4 and was told the battery is non-removable, and thus cannot be upgraded. Lame! Can anyone please explain a viable reason why batteries being non-removable is a good thing? I see no benefit to this.
The Droid 4 screen is larger than the Droid 2 (the phone itself is about a 1/2" taller and wider too). I prefer the larger phones, so this was another added plus for me (I also use a gel case on the phone, making it slightly larger still).
I like how when I press and hold an icon on my Home page, i get a context menu giving me a few options for what i want to do. On the Droid 2, no such menu existed, i had to drag/swipe/something to get things to happen...this wasn't supper intuitive for me.
On Droid 4 the "find wifi hotspot" works great. if Droid 2 HAD this, it was so buried that i never used it. One caveat I've found is, when I take the phone out of Airplane Mode, sometimes it leaves Wifi turned off (and sometimes not). I have to manually go into the "Settings" to turn Wifi back on. Not a huge issue, but it's strange that this only sometimes happens.
Camera
The Droid 4 has an 8MP camera, an improvement over the Droid 2. However I'm having the worst luck with the pictures being in focus. I take a lot of pics at concerts; often there is either low light, or the light is provided by spotlights shinning in various directions. Both of these things (in addition to the people on stage moving around) make the camera get confused when trying to focus, and quite a few are coming out unusable. I've been playing around with some of the camera settings, but haven't found anything that definitely works for what I'm doing. Any suggestions?
Keyboard
The new keyboard is a huge improvement! My favorite mobile keyboard ever is on the Blackberry Curve 8330 (i could type SO fast and accurately on that thing), this is the first keyboard I've found that rivals my beloved Curve 8330 (may she rest in piece). I used to dislike sending email via my Droid 2. The keyboard and email app just weren't fluid enough or me to feel comfortable, so i'd rarely send email from my phone (sometimes to the dismay of others waiting on a reply from me). The new phone/keyboard and updated GMail app has made a huge improvement in this for me. I've actually sent several emails from my phone this week! :)
On a semi-related note, the latest Words With Friends update doesn't like the real QWERTY keyboard. On my Droid 2 (presumably w/ an older version of the WWF app), when i went into the Chat window and pulled out the QWERTY keyboard, the chat panel would rotate to landscape mode, as it should, allowing me to type my WWF chats just as if it's a regular text message. With the latest version, the Chat window doesn't rotate...so i either a) HAVE to use the on-screen keyboard (which I don't like using) or I have to "type sideways", making me more prone to typos. I don't understand...this feature used to work fine, yet somehow it was removed? What gives?
Black Wednesday. AKA The Ice Cream Sandwich Update
Wednesday morning I awoke to a message that my phone had a "mandatory update" that needed to be downloaded: the OS upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich. I clicked the "install now" button, and put the phone down to do its thing, while I ate breakfast, occasionally glancing down watching the little status bar move along. (This being a rather large update, I wasn't worried that it seemed to crawl at a snail's pace.) After what appeared to be a successful install, I rebooted the phone, to find...the "dead Android" icon.
Somehow the OS update didn't take, and it hosed my phone. Nothing would work except the number keys and on-screen dial pad. I rebooted a few times, tried various experiments with the touch screen and the keyboard, it appeared that most of the phone was not responding.
I called Verizon Tech Support, honestly not expecting a lot of help. Much to my surprise, the first person I spoke with (Nicole) was completely on the ball. She answered all my questions; she knew various debug tricks to try; anything she wasn't familiar with, she'd research before having us proceed. The call took close to an hour, but she was able to restore my phone to its working order (with pretty minimal loss of my personal data), got the Ice Cream Sandwich update installed, and showed me several tricks along the way about my phone, installing/uninstalling apps, and so on. She was so helpful that before hanging up, I asked to be transferred to her boss so I could leave a positive review of my experience. Thank you, Nicole. (One of the things she showed me was the market.android.com website, and how you can use this to install/uninstall apps right to your phone. How had I never used this site before?!)
Second Impressions. Or Rather, First Impressions With Ice Cream Sandwich
With the new OS, I've definitely noticed some changes...
When my phone is connected to the laptop via USB, there are various "connection modes" -- mass storage mode, media, ftp, etc. With Honeycomb (Android OS 3.x), I had a "charge only" mode, which allowed the phone to charge off the laptop's USB cable, but none of the other connection options were in use (this made it so I could manipulate files on the phone directly, without worrying about "mass storage mode" taking control of the device instead). With Ice Cream Sandwich, this option seems to be gone. I know have 3 choices: Mass Storage, Media Device, and Camera. If there is still a "charge only" mode, they've hidden the menu option somewhere and I've yet to stumble across it. This slows me down when doing certain tasks on the phone, as I have to unplug it, rather than just switch to "charge only", like I used to do.
Text Messaging -- the version of this app that came with Honeycomb was better. The UI just made more sense to me, I don't like having my outgoing texts right-justified (which is how they're formatted in the new version). Also the black background in the "currently typing" window just doesn't work as well for me as the previous version. At first glance, everything I type looks like it has copy/paste formatting issues. It'll take some getting used to.
Also, I used to be able to do shift-up arrow to highlight text. It doesn't work the same way it did w the old OS. used to highlight everything, then pressing the delete key would delete the highlighted passage. Now it only deletes the right-most character, as if nothing was selected. Or more accurately, the shift-up-arrow process of highlighting text seems to be more sensitive than it was with the previous OS. Sometimes it will highlight/delete "correctly", other times not. It seems to be related to if whitespace is/isn't part of what's highlighted, but I've yet to figure out the "rule" as to why this sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
Copy/paste has been completely redone. In my opinion, they broke the "select" portion of that. I used to be able to select text the same way either with or without using my QWERTY keyboard. Now, it seems that if I don't have the QWERTY keyboard pulled out, the "select text" feature won't really work...it automatically pulls up the onscreen keyboard, and there's no way to get rid of it that -doesn't- also remove the "select text" markers.
On Droid 2 (or the old OS, rather), once I had the text selected, I could just long-click on the selection, and I'd get my context menu -- copy/cut, etc. Now that menu is gone. Yes there are cut/copy buttons at the top of the screen now, and they work fine. But why remove functionality that some people are currently using? (If you want to add the new copy/cut buttons at the top too, great, but I see no benefit in removing existing functionality that worked perfectly fine).
So once I got that sorted out, i was back on track with editing my notes and such...
Scrolling is almost TOO sensitive now. Any app (including the OS Home Page itself) is very sensitive when it comes to where my finger is, and if I'm "tilting" it even slightly to the side the phone will scroll to the left or right "next screen" of icons. I don't remember things being this sensitive before the OS update. (In all fairness, I am using a screen protector on the phone, and perhaps the protector has fastened itself to the phone mores in the last 2 days and is causing part of the issue...I haven't researched this fully). (Editor note: I wrote that last paragraph some weeks ago. After more continual use of the phone, I find this behavior hasn't changed. I don't' think it's the screen protector any more, something about the new OS is just more sensitive to finger movement now.)
Keyboard backlight -- It's more finicky when it turns on/off in low light situations. Is there an option for controlling this? I'll be typing at night, the backlight will kick on perfectly, and half way through composing my email, the light turns off, leaving me in the dark (literally).
Overall quite happy with the phone. Nicole at Verizon seemed to think the reason the Ice Cream Sandwich update crashed was due to an app I had installed, so I've been very slow with reinstalling things lately (I didn't even install TweetDeck until last week...I'm not even going to attempt to read all the messages I missed!). I think I have everything installed now save for the Amazon Free Daily app; I'm not sure that was the "culprit", and I really hope that's not the case, as I do like looking at the free daily apps.
If you're a QWERTY person like me, I'd check out the Droid 4 for sure (even if you're not....c'mon how can you deny the speed difference, an accuracy, when using a real keyboard). And I'm always on the lookout for more tips or app suggestions. Feel free to send over any recommendations!
-Nolan
Last week my Droid 2 started freaking out pretty badly, so I took this opportunity to upgrade to the Droid 4. When it comes to smartphones, I'm a QWERTY keyboard kind of guy (and love various other things about Droid phones) so this was the logical upgrade path for me...
First Impressions
The Droid 4 is noticeably faster and has a smoother response, which I expected, given the faster processor (the UI is a bit cleaner too). Lots of apps on my Droid 2 felt sluggish and unresponsive at times (and I'm usually the last guy to complain about such things). Everything on the Droid 4 has less lag time and the 4G connection is a noticeable improvement (I don't do much in terms of streaming audio/video, mostly just day to day productivity apps and a few games).
With my old Droid 2, over the last few months, it would lose the data connection periodically. I was never able to pin down a particular reason why this was happening; sometimes it'd only come back if I rebooted the phone. The Droid 4 started doing this too, and if I wasn't also on a wifi connection, I just had to wait for data to come back up. (I later learned this was a bug in the OS, which was fixed when I "upgraded" to the Ice Cream Sandwich OS...more on that later...)
Battery life is noticeably worse with the Droid 4. For the Droid 2, I bought the "extended battery", which allowed me to keep a charge for around 12 hours of regular usage. (It continues to baffle me that smartphone battery life can't get any better, but that's a separate discussion.) I asked about the extended battery for Droid 4 and was told the battery is non-removable, and thus cannot be upgraded. Lame! Can anyone please explain a viable reason why batteries being non-removable is a good thing? I see no benefit to this.
The Droid 4 screen is larger than the Droid 2 (the phone itself is about a 1/2" taller and wider too). I prefer the larger phones, so this was another added plus for me (I also use a gel case on the phone, making it slightly larger still).
I like how when I press and hold an icon on my Home page, i get a context menu giving me a few options for what i want to do. On the Droid 2, no such menu existed, i had to drag/swipe/something to get things to happen...this wasn't supper intuitive for me.
On Droid 4 the "find wifi hotspot" works great. if Droid 2 HAD this, it was so buried that i never used it. One caveat I've found is, when I take the phone out of Airplane Mode, sometimes it leaves Wifi turned off (and sometimes not). I have to manually go into the "Settings" to turn Wifi back on. Not a huge issue, but it's strange that this only sometimes happens.
Camera
The Droid 4 has an 8MP camera, an improvement over the Droid 2. However I'm having the worst luck with the pictures being in focus. I take a lot of pics at concerts; often there is either low light, or the light is provided by spotlights shinning in various directions. Both of these things (in addition to the people on stage moving around) make the camera get confused when trying to focus, and quite a few are coming out unusable. I've been playing around with some of the camera settings, but haven't found anything that definitely works for what I'm doing. Any suggestions?
Keyboard
The new keyboard is a huge improvement! My favorite mobile keyboard ever is on the Blackberry Curve 8330 (i could type SO fast and accurately on that thing), this is the first keyboard I've found that rivals my beloved Curve 8330 (may she rest in piece). I used to dislike sending email via my Droid 2. The keyboard and email app just weren't fluid enough or me to feel comfortable, so i'd rarely send email from my phone (sometimes to the dismay of others waiting on a reply from me). The new phone/keyboard and updated GMail app has made a huge improvement in this for me. I've actually sent several emails from my phone this week! :)
On a semi-related note, the latest Words With Friends update doesn't like the real QWERTY keyboard. On my Droid 2 (presumably w/ an older version of the WWF app), when i went into the Chat window and pulled out the QWERTY keyboard, the chat panel would rotate to landscape mode, as it should, allowing me to type my WWF chats just as if it's a regular text message. With the latest version, the Chat window doesn't rotate...so i either a) HAVE to use the on-screen keyboard (which I don't like using) or I have to "type sideways", making me more prone to typos. I don't understand...this feature used to work fine, yet somehow it was removed? What gives?
Black Wednesday. AKA The Ice Cream Sandwich Update
Wednesday morning I awoke to a message that my phone had a "mandatory update" that needed to be downloaded: the OS upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich. I clicked the "install now" button, and put the phone down to do its thing, while I ate breakfast, occasionally glancing down watching the little status bar move along. (This being a rather large update, I wasn't worried that it seemed to crawl at a snail's pace.) After what appeared to be a successful install, I rebooted the phone, to find...the "dead Android" icon.
Somehow the OS update didn't take, and it hosed my phone. Nothing would work except the number keys and on-screen dial pad. I rebooted a few times, tried various experiments with the touch screen and the keyboard, it appeared that most of the phone was not responding.
I called Verizon Tech Support, honestly not expecting a lot of help. Much to my surprise, the first person I spoke with (Nicole) was completely on the ball. She answered all my questions; she knew various debug tricks to try; anything she wasn't familiar with, she'd research before having us proceed. The call took close to an hour, but she was able to restore my phone to its working order (with pretty minimal loss of my personal data), got the Ice Cream Sandwich update installed, and showed me several tricks along the way about my phone, installing/uninstalling apps, and so on. She was so helpful that before hanging up, I asked to be transferred to her boss so I could leave a positive review of my experience. Thank you, Nicole. (One of the things she showed me was the market.android.com website, and how you can use this to install/uninstall apps right to your phone. How had I never used this site before?!)
Second Impressions. Or Rather, First Impressions With Ice Cream Sandwich
With the new OS, I've definitely noticed some changes...
When my phone is connected to the laptop via USB, there are various "connection modes" -- mass storage mode, media, ftp, etc. With Honeycomb (Android OS 3.x), I had a "charge only" mode, which allowed the phone to charge off the laptop's USB cable, but none of the other connection options were in use (this made it so I could manipulate files on the phone directly, without worrying about "mass storage mode" taking control of the device instead). With Ice Cream Sandwich, this option seems to be gone. I know have 3 choices: Mass Storage, Media Device, and Camera. If there is still a "charge only" mode, they've hidden the menu option somewhere and I've yet to stumble across it. This slows me down when doing certain tasks on the phone, as I have to unplug it, rather than just switch to "charge only", like I used to do.
Text Messaging -- the version of this app that came with Honeycomb was better. The UI just made more sense to me, I don't like having my outgoing texts right-justified (which is how they're formatted in the new version). Also the black background in the "currently typing" window just doesn't work as well for me as the previous version. At first glance, everything I type looks like it has copy/paste formatting issues. It'll take some getting used to.
Also, I used to be able to do shift-up arrow to highlight text. It doesn't work the same way it did w the old OS. used to highlight everything, then pressing the delete key would delete the highlighted passage. Now it only deletes the right-most character, as if nothing was selected. Or more accurately, the shift-up-arrow process of highlighting text seems to be more sensitive than it was with the previous OS. Sometimes it will highlight/delete "correctly", other times not. It seems to be related to if whitespace is/isn't part of what's highlighted, but I've yet to figure out the "rule" as to why this sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
Copy/paste has been completely redone. In my opinion, they broke the "select" portion of that. I used to be able to select text the same way either with or without using my QWERTY keyboard. Now, it seems that if I don't have the QWERTY keyboard pulled out, the "select text" feature won't really work...it automatically pulls up the onscreen keyboard, and there's no way to get rid of it that -doesn't- also remove the "select text" markers.
On Droid 2 (or the old OS, rather), once I had the text selected, I could just long-click on the selection, and I'd get my context menu -- copy/cut, etc. Now that menu is gone. Yes there are cut/copy buttons at the top of the screen now, and they work fine. But why remove functionality that some people are currently using? (If you want to add the new copy/cut buttons at the top too, great, but I see no benefit in removing existing functionality that worked perfectly fine).
So once I got that sorted out, i was back on track with editing my notes and such...
Scrolling is almost TOO sensitive now. Any app (including the OS Home Page itself) is very sensitive when it comes to where my finger is, and if I'm "tilting" it even slightly to the side the phone will scroll to the left or right "next screen" of icons. I don't remember things being this sensitive before the OS update. (In all fairness, I am using a screen protector on the phone, and perhaps the protector has fastened itself to the phone mores in the last 2 days and is causing part of the issue...I haven't researched this fully). (Editor note: I wrote that last paragraph some weeks ago. After more continual use of the phone, I find this behavior hasn't changed. I don't' think it's the screen protector any more, something about the new OS is just more sensitive to finger movement now.)
Keyboard backlight -- It's more finicky when it turns on/off in low light situations. Is there an option for controlling this? I'll be typing at night, the backlight will kick on perfectly, and half way through composing my email, the light turns off, leaving me in the dark (literally).
Overall quite happy with the phone. Nicole at Verizon seemed to think the reason the Ice Cream Sandwich update crashed was due to an app I had installed, so I've been very slow with reinstalling things lately (I didn't even install TweetDeck until last week...I'm not even going to attempt to read all the messages I missed!). I think I have everything installed now save for the Amazon Free Daily app; I'm not sure that was the "culprit", and I really hope that's not the case, as I do like looking at the free daily apps.
If you're a QWERTY person like me, I'd check out the Droid 4 for sure (even if you're not....c'mon how can you deny the speed difference, an accuracy, when using a real keyboard). And I'm always on the lookout for more tips or app suggestions. Feel free to send over any recommendations!
-Nolan