I was a little nervous the first time I rooted my Droid. I was mainly nervous because of the stories I had read about bricked Droids. But those horror stories are few and far between, and the rooting community has so many resources available to make rooting easy to understand. A lot more people are now able to hack their machines without too much worry.
Just last night I loaded the Bugless Beast 1.1 ROM, to replace a DroidMod 1.0 install. So far, I’m very glad I made the switch. Bugless Beast seems so much more “snappy”, for lack of a better term. It’s quick and seems to be lighter on my resources.
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What the heck, there seems to be a manual cover that has leaked, giving people the impression that the Motorola Droid 2 might be coming soon. I just payed pretty good money for a Droid 1 not too long ago, so I’m hoping that things on the market aren’t moving this fast. I think the original droid still has a lot of potential and they should continue to tap into that rather than put out more devices so soon.
From TFTS:
Whatever it is, it apparently turned up somewhere on the cover of a Verizon manual. The device looks pretty similar to the first Droid but it’s not quite like it. It has a large touchscreen display, Motorola’s and Verizon’s logos are in place but the physical buttons are way smaller. Does it also hide a slide-out horizontal full QWERTY keyboard?
Read their whole rundown.
This has happened to me a couple times now, and of course the 2.1 update needs to be declined in order to keep using DroidMod.
If you get alerted to install 2.1 while using DroidMod, even if it happens more than once, the solution is to:
- Accept the update, and wait for SPRecovery to kick in on your Droid
- Select the option to just reboot
And that’s it.
Your Droid will reboot and you will no longer be prompted to install 2.1, at least until they push it out again. When that time comes, if it does, you’ll probably be able to do the same thing again to keep it from installing.
In a recent personal moment of pondering, I tried to figure out in my head why exactly I like my Droid so much more than other cell phones I’ve used.
It wasn’t that hard to figure out why. I’ll get to that shortly.
What phones have I used before using the Droid? Here’s a quick rundown of my cell phone progression:
- 1st cell phone ever: One of those old-school Nokia devices from the late 90′s
- 2nd cell phone: Some sort of Samsung flip phone from around 2001-2002
- 3rd cell phone: A Motorola Razr
- 4th cell phone: A Blackberry Curve
- Current cell phone: A Motorola Droid
Basically, the Droid is my second smart phone. Blackberry opened to doors to what a cell phone could really be capable of, and made me realize the power of a “smart” phone.
Everything else before that was pretty much only good for calling or text messaging, at most.
The Razr looked cool, but I hated it. Enough said about that.
The Curve was a decent device. Once I could send emails and connect to Gmail through my Blackberry, my life became so much more easy, as it was actually now possible for me to keep up on the insane amounts of email I deal with every day.
But the Droid – now this is the one that is really starting to blur the line for me as far as the whole cell phone/mini-computers convergence trend goes.
Why do I like the Droid over the other phones?
- It allows me to work without sitting in front of a computer, something I could almost say about the Blackberry, but not quite.
- It has a nice screen – and even though I didn’t like the idea of touch screens in the past, I’ve grown to love touch screens after using the Droid and getting used to how they feel.
- It can be hacked – that appeals to the tinkerer in me.
- Web browsing on the Droid is so much more better than on the Curve, I wasn’t a fan of the web browser on the Curve at all – I can even log into and use BaseCamp on my Droid!
- I can watch web video on this thing
- I currently love the fact that this is pretty much a Google phone – which made my life easier by using my existing Gmail contacts rather than me having to input all my contacts into a new phone
I could probably go on for a while, but those are some of my major points. I also understand that many of these items could probably be more in line with raving about using any smart phone with the Android operating system.
What don’t I like about the Droid?
There’s a few things.
The main thing I don’t like is that it’s a Google phone, which is funny because that is one of the reasons I like it too. There’s just too many times where I feel that Google knows a little too much about me, or that I’m relying on Google just a little too much for daily operations.
The battery also dies pretty fast, usually I can’t make a charge last more than 24 hrs if I’m using the phone at what I would consider a “normal” capacity. But that is ok too, I’ve gotten used to it.
Conclusion
All in all, I really find that the Droid enhances my ability to keep up on work and play much more than any other phone, and that is the main reason that I like it so much. It’s not just a “phone” with a bunch of other features that I don’t use. I actually push this thing and it’s features to it’s limits, and it handles it all quite well.
