From my experience(HTC Magic), I can usually get a couple days on a full charge. My particular phone advertises 13day standby time or 7 hour talk time. I don't spend all day on my phone, but I have been tinkering with it quite a bit in the evenings. However, I'd think even a heavy texter/talker could get a full day on a charge. My phone uses a USB cable for the charger, so it's actually charging up while I'm transferring mp3's or files from my PC and can get to full battery fairly quickly. All in all, I'm really happy I got an Android phone.

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i dont talk much but i use the internet and gps a lot.

When i ride i use pandora and either gps for directions or gps to track my route and I get about 8-10 hours. If I'm not riding and only using it for a phone and occassional internet, aka. very very very little usage so basically just standby, it can go 2 days without charging.

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I hate the idea of upgrading from my Nextel i580 "lady's compact"; it's been a trusty phone through everything. But I've been looking at the Droid "kitkat bar", because I've had good luck with Motorolas, am too much of a luddite to go through the other myriads of phones and I can really use the Google moving map stuff.

Anyway does anyone know if the mp3 player can handle files up to 200 meg? That would be a selling point for me, but apparently a technical hurdle as well, my ipod classic can't properly handle those (not to say I consider iPod the definitive player)

Also can anyone verify that Droid does the UMA/Wifi thing? I'd like to experiment with that some day. Google searches seem to say it does but it's not in the Motorola specs.


And if anyone is looking at the i580 I say get one. I don't use lots of the tech stuff but as a phone it's the best I've owned. Only part to break on the 580 was the external LCD because I fell asleep on it, could have replaced it for $20, never bothered. Doubt I'll be as lucky with an the LCD on a kitkat bar, but again that's the luddite talking. Plus the 580 actually looks like a phone :} (man i'm getting old)

But thanks for any help with the Droid questions :}

I have had my Droid now for about a month, and it does kick ass. The battery life is quite good considering I leave the gps enabled and turn on wifi during the work day. Easily makes it through the day and well into the night. I was a huge openzaurus/openembedded fan, and this feels like where it was heading all along. I just wish all the cool open embedded software from the zaurus repos would be ported over to the Droid. It's certainly not an iPhone, that is true, and that is one of the things I like best about it. No Apple or AT&T is a huge plus in my book. With the Nexus 1 coming out next month, it comes down to the keyboard (i dig the hard keyboard as a former crackberry user) and the network (T-Mobile vs. Verizon). The Droid makes me feel less bad about buying the absolutely horrendous OpenMoko Freerunner I bought a couple years back.

Almost forgot, the call quality is far better than the three Blackberrys I have owned and my sister's iphone hands down.

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Ok I've had the Motorola Droid for a few days and it's great. If you get one, budget some time off to sit down and 'make it yours'.... you can customize these things about as far as you want. I'm still loading this or that app and fooling around with it, but even now it's rockin. Google Maps and Docs have completely changed how I use mass transit, and what I can do while carpooling (respectively). Never bothered to try wardriving until I got the Droid. And it's really nice once you get a file manager loaded to get down to the filesystem and see everything laid out like a Linux machine. They keyboard and camera are both a bit 'meh' and it has to be charged up about daily but I still love it.

Oh yeah, good phone too. Having all your contacts Google-ized takes a little getting used to. A dedicated "hang up" button would be nice, but realistically you can end the call multiple ways in just a few touches. I found it odd that it would let you answer a call with the audio set for bluetooth even if your BT device is not on.

As for my questions, I found the device will not play huge .mp3 files. But, use mp32ogg to convert them to Ogg and no problem. Ogg is open source anyway and I couldn't find a quick reason not to standardize on it, so I guess I'm Ogg now.

So far so good, I'll try to remember to check in after the honeymoon's over...

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Count me in as a new Droid user. I've had mine for a week and to be honest, I'm pretty impressed, particularly since Verizon is such a bunch of *(#$&&%( about locking down their other phones. I've got several friends with iPhones, and the differences between them and the Droid are pretty minor. About the only questions I've got are:

-Are there any apps you can't live without? I'm finding the Marketplace to be pretty unwieldy in discovering new apps

-Is anybody doing decent reviews/rankings of apps? In the Marketplace it seems like almost everything is getting tons of stars and therefore is pretty useless for helping with decisions.

I would definitely recommend a file manager of some kind. I'm currently using ES File Explorer and it works well for what I need. It really depends on what you want/need to do with your phone. Since the 1.6 update, the Google Nav system has really impressed me. It works well and has been great when I'm on business trips. I'll agree that the market place is a bit clunky when you're looking for a specific type of app. The selection of apps is good though. Anyway, I'm glad to see more folks joining the Android crowd.

Yeah, that is fair. Besides a phone, I'm looking to use this as a basic business/connectivity tool. The built in email and browser aren't bad, but the email in particular leaves a bit to be desired. I looked at K9 mail as a replacement, but their font choice is rather small. The Opera browser was a buggy mess. Thanks for the ES File explorer tip, I particularly like the FTP/Samba integration they've got.

I've installed DocsToGo, but that doesn't understand ODF files, which I do use on a regular basis. Something that could read those would be nice.

One thing I haven't found is some sort of update manager for installed apps. From what I've seen you have to hunt for updates individually, and that strikes me as really unwieldy for anything other than an app or two.

EDIT - OK, this is just too spooky. As I was typing the above complaint, I got a notification that an upgrade was available for one of my apps, so apparently Android does this on its own. If that is true for all apps, that is a very good thing.

I've played with this a bit and am equally impressed. The depth of information you can search on is not obvious, but in the short time I've tried it, it is reallly an impressive database behind the maps.

One thing that I wonder about though is finding apps to do things that I didn't really think about. That was kind of the idea behind asking people for apps they couldn't live without. What I'm hoping is that Android is still in an early enough phase that the really creative apps haven't hit yet.

It seems to check for updates fairly often, although I haven't found a way to force an update check. I've been using the "Dolphin" browser lately and have been happy with it. It allows for tabs and gesturing which has been fairly handy.

I failed to mention a task killer app as well. There are several out there, but I've been using "Advanced Task Killer". It's kind of like a task manager, allowing you to kill off any tasks that may be running in the background. This can save your battery life some.

Also, I've found "Silent Time" to be very useful. You can set it up to put your phone in to silent mode at specific times during the day. For example, Monday through Friday, between 8am and 5pm, my phone goes to silent mode. I have a bad habit of forgetting to silence my phone before a meeting or whatever. Now I don't have to worry about it.

I like pandahome. Its a home screen replacement that allows you to have more homescreens. The basic themes are very chinese or 13 year old girl looking but you can use openhome or ahome themes.

I like also my tracks, Pandora, shop savy, astro filemanager, andftp, and connectbot.

my tracks uses gps to record where you went.
pandora is the same as the pc version, allows you to stream music.
shop savy is a barcode scanner that searches the www for better prices.
astro filemanager is a filemanager...
andftp is a ftp client...
connectbot is a ssh client.

Now THAT is a useful app! I went for the Pro version since there are a couple of people I always want to be able to reach me. This actually solves a problem that has been bugging me for a bit on all phones, namely that I don't want to be woken up at 3AM by some drunk yabbo dialing the wrong number, but I also don't want to turn off the ringer because there are a couple of family members who might really need to reach me at odd hours.

That is a nice client. Now I just have to get an electron microscope to read the text!

iTunes info for Droid/Android phones
http://www.linux.com/news/embedded-m...-via-the-cloud

Open the Market application, hit the "list" button (whatever the "lines" thing is between Home and Back) and pick Downloads. You can look at your downloaded apps and manually update, write reviews or uninstall them.

Since someone asked what to run, here's what I've added....

Mobile Defense - in case someone steals your phone
Ringdroid - great for recording/setting up ringtones, includes sound editor!
G-Mon - wardriving app
Google goggles - use your camera to search the web
Ringer Toggle - widget for ringer on/off
My Tracks - leave breadcrumbs on map like a GPS
Audiomanager Widget - display/change your volumes
Home++ Beta - replacement home, great stuff but crashes now and then, just beta hopefully it gets better
Batterylife - temp, type and health of battery widget
Weatherbug - probably not the best weather but I like the location setup, and i could never figure out accuweather
Unit Converter - converts ANYTHING
Tricorder - access all your phones sensors, star trek style. great at parties
Spare parts - battery info, haven't played with it much yet
Mount USB - mount your storage without using the menu
Astro - file manager
Meridian - supposedly one of the best players
Star Wars Light Saber - take a guess
AK Notepad - there are better notepads but this is good and i can't bother to look
Barcode Scanner - does what it says, find stuff for cheap. there are similar apps to this

Even with all that stuff, I'm still barely scratching the surface of this thing!
I had a task manager but Home++ has one built in.
To do - pdf reader, local spreadsheet editor (although Google Docs is pretty sweet), maybe a calender thing and i haven't done squat with email yet.

No one corrected this yet, but its a common mis-conception. The data plan for the droid is unlimited. The 5G tethering plan for smartphones (not yet supported on the droid) is capped at 5G.

Just picked mine up this morning and I am loving it to far. Connectbot is so awesome for ssh.