A “Real Life” Guide to Android Phones

As more peo­ple I know pur­chase Android based phones—I have been hear­ing a vari­ety of ques­tions, com­plaints, and opin­ions about the phone. As I have had my Motorola Android for about 4+ months now, I have had enough expe­ri­ence that I wanted to put together this blog entry for the ben­e­fit of others.

For now, lets call this blog entry “ver­sion 1.0″ and I will update it going for­ward as I learn some­thing new and/or get user feed­back. And in an inter­est­ing twist of fate, I just received my Android 2.1 update — but I didn’t see any­thing that impacted the con­tent I cur­rently have.

Just remember—these are my expe­ri­ences and opin­ions. What I wanted to do was assem­ble the key ele­ments of what I have learned that peo­ple could use to max­i­mize their Android expe­ri­ence. After some thought I decided the con­ver­sa­tion would cover the fol­low­ing topics:

• Terms You Should Know
• Set­ting Your Expectations
• Slow­ing the Drain On Your Battery
• Evolv­ing Your Charg­ing Habits
• Rec­om­mended Applications

I think there are a lot of use­ful pieces of info below—so I hope every­one finds some­thing of value.

Terms You Should Know

As I men­tion tech­ni­cal terms in this blog entry, I wanted to pro­vide a brief intro­duc­tion / def­i­n­i­tion as to what they are. If you are famil­iar with these terms you can skip to the next section.

Smart­phone—Describes phones that have fea­tures found in the Motorola Android and the iPhone (Wikipedia—Smartphone).

1G / 3G—Refers to the type of net­work you are on. 3G is faster than 1G—but not all areas have 3G avail­able yet.

Micro USB—This is the power/connection port on the Motorola Android (but it is not con­sis­tent across all Android based phones). The Micro USB port is evolv­ing as the stan­dard con­nec­tion for all cell phones (exclud­ing Apple’s iPhone).

Mini USB—This is the power/connection port most com­monly found on Black­berry devices. The Mini USB is not compatible/interchangeable with MicroUSB

Wi-Fi—Same tech­nol­ogy as in a wire­less lap­top which allows you to con­nect to a PC based net­work (use­ful if a 1G/ 3G con­nec­tion isn’t avail­able or if you are overseas).

GPS—Stands for Global Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem and it’s used for nav­i­ga­tion appli­ca­tions and appli­ca­tions that work on your cur­rent location.

Data Roam­ing—Sim­i­lar to when you roam out of your car­ri­ers area. Data roam­ing allows you to access the Inter­net when you are out of 3G range (WARNING — If you Roam out­side of the United States — you are going to get a big sur­prise in your next monthly bill).

Set­ting Your Expectations

It’s easy to get sucked into the “WOW” fac­tor of Smart­phones. It can best be described as hav­ing a mini lap­top in your hands. So the “wow” fac­tor doesn’t quickly become the “bow wow” fac­tor, its impor­tant to under­stand the pro’s / con’s of var­i­ous fea­tures — so that you can make the choices that best fit your needs.

Day “1” User Experience

From what I have expe­ri­enced, it is not uncom­mon to see new Android users walk out of the store with the fol­low­ing set­tings turned on:

• GPS
• Wi-Fi
• Screen Dis­play Maximized

So while “user expe­ri­ence” is maximized—that expe­ri­ence can be quickly muted by the laws of physics—especially when you see the bat­tery run­ning on empty after only a few hours. So in the absence of an “energy genie” you need to keep a close eye on power hun­gry appli­ca­tions (I will speak more in depth on this below).

Data Traf­fic and Roaming

There is an old adage — your com­puter is only as fast as its slow­est com­po­nent. And when it comes to your Android’s con­nec­tion speed you may expe­ri­ence sit­u­a­tions where it just “seems slower” than nor­mal. While there are a num­ber of fac­tors that can lead to this, some com­mon ones are:

• You have a lot of users on the same net­work in the same place
• You are in an area that sup­ports a slower stan­dard (ie. 1G vs 3G)

I men­tion a spe­cific tool that is use­ful in this regard later in this entry.

Slow­ing the Drain on Your Battery

So what can you do to max­i­mize your bat­tery life? Other than keep­ing your phone plugged into a wall 24/7 you should consider:

1. Turn off Wi-Fi — For most every­day appli­ca­tions you aren’t going to miss any­thing, so turn this OFF (you can turn back on when needed).
2. Turn off GPS — If you have to use the GPS — turn it on when you need it — and turn it off as soon as pos­si­ble. If you are using it in your car, make sure you have it con­nected to a power cable attached to your cig­a­rette adapter.
3. Turn down the Screen Bright­ness — The Screen bright­ness can really suck up bat­tery life quickly. I sug­gest turn­ing down the bright­ness. When you indoors this usu­ally isn’t a prob­lem, but when you go out­side in the day­light the screen is hard to read.
4. “Chatty” Appli­ca­tions — There are cer­tain appli­ca­tions (i.e. IM aggre­ga­tors) — that if you don’t con­fig­ure them cor­rectly can impact bat­tery per­for­mance — because they are con­stantly access­ing the 3G net­work. The gen­eral rule of thumb is if it offers a delay set­ting — try them.
5. Work in Progress — “Back­ground Data” Switch — I just started work­ing with this set­ting (located in Set­tings | Accounts & Sync | Back­ground Data) — and while it’s early I am pleas­antly sur­prised by the results so far. What this set­ting con­trols is the back­ground updat­ing of appli­ca­tion data, and since I have both Face­book and Gmail accounts active, I am already see­ing a sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings in bat­tery life. The only incon­ve­nience is that I have to man­u­ally refresh Gmail, and my Face­book page refreshes when I open the appli­ca­tion. But, in terms of extend­ing the bat­tery life, this is a minor incon­ve­nience. I also found out that the Mar­ket­place appli­ca­tion needs this turned on (it will ask you to enable this set­ting if turned off).

Evolv­ing Your Charg­ing Habits

For sea­soned smart­phone vet­er­ans none of this is news. They also know in addi­tion to con­trol­ling the phone set­tings, they also need to adopt spe­cial smart charg­ing habits, some of which include:

• Car lighter adapter.
• Wall.
• Lap­top.

New Smart­phone users need to incor­po­rate these techniques.

Some “best prac­tices” I have learned:

• Using the PC USB cable for charg­ing. The charge pro­vided by the USB port doesn’t appear pow­er­ful enough to charge your phone’s bat­tery (if at all) if the user’s screen con­trast is set on high or a chatty appli­ca­tions are running.
• The Mini-USB car charger from Wal­mart works just fine — and it’s about $10 less than from the phone store.
• In the Android’s “Set­tings” appli­ca­tion, the “Bat­tery Use” sec­tion will give you a very good idea of what com­po­nents are con­sum­ing the bat­tery life

In short you have to deter­mine the com­bi­na­tion of set­tings that works best for you.

Rec­om­mended Applications

Accessed through the Mar­ket­place appli­ca­tion, there are a wealth of FREE and FEE based appli­ca­tions. You should do searches from time to time to see what the lat­est new appli­ca­tions are—however I find the fol­low­ing FREE appli­ca­tions to be very use­ful and all are installed on my Droid.

While my list will evolve over time, my cur­rent list of “rec­om­mended” appli­ca­tions evolved as a com­bi­na­tion of the fol­low­ing preferences:

• Over­all usefulness
• Visual appear­ance
• Cost

For clar­ity, I orga­nized the appli­ca­tions by category:

Core Appli­ca­tions

These are appli­ca­tions that you will use most likely every day (Appli­ca­tion names are in BOLD)

• Dol­phin Browser—My favorite Inter­net Browser as it enables “pinch to zoom” functionality.
• antivirus —I haven’t heard if there is a Droid based virus yet, but it can’t hurt to have.
• Bat­tery­time—Pro­vides detailed infor­ma­tion on how much bat­tery life remains.
• The Weather Chan­nel — Allows you to see fore­casts for one or more areas across a num­ber of time-frames.
• Task Killers — There are a num­ber of appli­ca­tions in this space. The gen­eral con­cept is that they kill run­ning tasks while the screen is off, sav­ing bat­tery life. I have been using Task Man­ager but I have been look­ing at ES Task Man­ager which has some inter­est­ing features.

Mis­cel­la­neous Utilities

These are pro­grams that you might not use every day, but are close to being con­sid­er­ing core. (Appli­ca­tion names are in BOLD)

• Speed Test—This util­ity allows you to deter­mine the speed of your Android’s cur­rent con­nec­tion speed
• Droid­light —Use­ful util­ity that turns the Android’s cam­era flash into a flashlight
• Voice Recorder—Use­ful appli­ca­tion if you want to cre­ate voice based notes for yourself.
• Note taking—A num­ber of appli­ca­tions in this space, used for tak­ing notes. Easy Note is one of the most intu­itive graph­i­cal appli­ca­tions I have seen.

Mes­sag­ing and Social Networking

• Tweet­cast — My favorite Android Twit­ter client
• IM Aggre­ga­tor — Client that allows you to com­bine IM accounts (Yahoo, AOL, FB). I have been using eBuddy, though Meebo is some­thing to look at if you are not sat­is­fied with eBuddy.
• Hand­cent SMS — A sig­nif­i­cant upgrade over the default Android mes­sage client. Get the font packs — Font Pack 3 (pre­view Font 6) is very nice.

News & Entertainment

• NubiNews — Aggre­gates news/events from a vari­ety of sources
• Online Music — Appli­ca­tions that stream free music. I have used Pan­dora and I might start look­ing at Last.fm.
• Sport­stap — If you are into sports, this is the app to have.

Finance

• Google Finance — Allows you to keep track of the mar­ket, stocks and news./li>
• Bank of Amer­ica — If you are a Bank of Amer­ica cus­tomer, you can use this appli­ca­tion to access your account information.

“Wow Fac­tor” Apps

• Google Sky — Using the cam­era you take a pic­ture of the night sky and it iden­ti­fies the constellations.
• Bar Code Scan­ning — Using the cam­era you scan a bar­code and it fig­ures out the prod­uct and looks up the price.
• Shazam — Lis­tens to a song that is play­ing and then fig­ures out the song name and artist singing it.

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Tags: Android, DROID, motorola, phone, smartphone, Technology, telephone

Category: Articles, Telephones