Droid comes tomorrow..what to know?!

[kevpowerhouse2]

hi all.
I have seen the light! I have seen the error of my ways. I am now leaving my Blackberry Storm and coming home to the promise-land that is DROID!
I get it tomorrow. However I do need to know some things. Im sure I could spend an hour searching the forums and get answers here and there, but I really wanted to make one thread where I could get all my answers.

1. Is the transition from Blackberry to Android tough? As far as learning terminology and such. I have seen words on the droid forums that im not familiar with for Blackberry.

2. How much app memory does the Droid have and are Droids capable of memory leaks?

3. Do new OS and hybrids happen a lot for Droids? (i've read somewhere that 2.1 is coming soon)

Anything else anyone can think of that i need to know to help me transition from bb to android would be appreciated...especially from anyone who has used bb and is now using android.

That phone cant get here soon enough!

 

[that1bb]

The transition is not too painful, there is a pretty good go-by here in the forums about making the switch. If you use Google sync for blackberry, you are halfway there. The Droid has plenty of memory for most people. Android handles its memory differently than Blackberry. Please, do NOT use a task manager. This is stressed many times in the forums, and I have found from personal experience that Android just works better without my intervention. Just let Android do its thing and don't worry about the memory.
People are constantly building new and modified OSes. Personally, I just keep mine stock and as basic as possible. Enjoy, and welcome to Android, the world free of battery pulls, outlook, and 10 minute boot ups.

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

10 minute boot up's? really? man, i thought storms were slow to boot up!

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

oh wait, i miss-read....the world "free of" is where i got lost. awesome! no 10 min. boot ups. but what did you mean by "outlook"?

 

[that1bb]

Microsoft outlook. Used for synchronizing my addresses and calendar.

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

oh gotcha!

 

[digitard#WN]

I was a BB user for quite a long time (Storm, Curve, Pearl Flip, and so forth).

I bought my Droid on release day... and I never looked back.

1) The transition is quite easy. You'll miss BBM for a few days, but Google Chat is more effective IMHO since anyone can have it, and not just BB/RIM users. Outside of that the only thing you may notice is the lack of "push" email support for non-Gmail accounts (you'll have a Gmail email directory, and an email directory). Easy way around that is setting GMail to retrieve your other emails via imap or whatever. There's a whole tutorial around it.

2) The Droid has 256mb of app memory, but most of the application data is stored on the SD card and the core app is stored on your Droid. So that 1, 2, 3,4MB file or whatever may store on the phone, but a lot of its saved data will go to the SD card. I haven't gotten above about 40% used with everything installed. Google is working on allowing apps to install to the micro SD card anyhow... so see what that future holds.

Any phone OS can hypothetically have a memory leak. It's not the device, but the way the OS manages the applications and OS memory. RIM has a bad tendency lately to have poor OS design where it allocates memory poorly and it "leaks" slowly and you have to reboot to get it back. Luckily the 2.0.1 and 2.1 OS' (both official for 2.0.1 and ROM leaks/custom for 2.1) have been amazingly solid with memory management.

3) With any "hackable" device there's going to be hybrid custom OS' out there. It's a good way for ROM cookers to give you the best of everything. The official release of 2.0.1 is pretty solid as far as things go. If you want to play with cooked ROM's (I've had great luck w/ Pete's from Alldroid) then you're going to find a lot of hybrids. They tend to have the most features because your device is rooted and you can take little bits and pieces to get things really flying.

For example: I'm running Pete's .7 BB ROM @ 1.25GHZ. So I've over doubled my processor speed from stock. I'm also able to use it as a WiFi hotspot among other things. It's got a base of the ESE53 base of the OS, and everything seems great so far. There's a lot you can do with Rooting your phone, but that's at your own risk.

 

[SOLO#AC]

If you use My backup for your contacts, log on now and export a .csv file to your computer. After your Droid is activated you won't be able to access those contacts online.

 

[entwined82]

Or use google sync to pull all of your contacts.

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

Great info people. Now i have more questions that have come from your answers:

1. What does "rooted" mean? Thats one of those words that arent used in Blackberry language, or at least, i've never seen it. Also "ROM".

2. Is "my backup" a website to store contacts? Right now i use "idrive lite" and it says it can be used for Android. Im gonna go this route because i've tried Google Sync on my Storm and hated it because for some reason, it would list contacts twice and it would give some contacts the wrong email addresses/ phone numbers or switch them. Example: Bob might have Fred's email address but Fred might have Sally's phone number. It was a pain in the ass to edit everything to its original state.

3. this quote is way over my head, can some one explain this as if they were talking to a 5 yr. old.......
"I'm running Pete's .7 BB ROM @ 1.25GHZ. So I've over doubled my processor speed from stock. I'm also able to use it as a WiFi hotspot among other things. It's got a base of the ESE53 base of the OS, and everything seems great so far. There's a lot you can do with Rooting your phone, but that's at your own risk".

 

[Romple]

Rooting basically means attaining administrator rights over the phone's OS with access to system directories and settings. Rooting doesn't really do anything but let you do a lot of other stuff to the phone... basically anything you want.


I just got my Droid on Friday coming from a Storm. I do miss Viigo, but that's about it. Although Feedr is a very nice rss app.

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

didnt like Viigo for some reason. I used Poynt and will miss that one. also Pocket Express.

 

[PJnc284]

"I'm running Pete's .7 BB ROM @ 1.25GHZ. So I've over doubled my processor speed from stock. I'm also able to use it as a WiFi hotspot among other things. It's got a base of the ESE53 base of the OS, and everything seems great so far. There's a lot you can do with Rooting your phone, but that's at your own risk".

After you root, you have the option to do a lot of nifty things. One is adding custom roms. The stock droid is clocked at 550Mhz and running 2.0.1. Most of the custom roms are capable of overclocking to over 1GHz with certain kernels and include the 2.1 release that's coming soon. They also allow you to turn your phone into a mobile hotspot with wifi tethering so you can connect to it and use your droid's EVDO connection to connect on a laptop.

Rooting is easy, but installing a new recovery image and custom rom is a little tedious but luckily there are apps like droidmod that can do it all for you.

http://droidmod.org/

Pete's forum over at alldroid. There's also a guy over there working on porting the HTC Desire 2.1 SenseUI rom to the droid.
http://alldroid.org/forums/956-Pete

While unlikely that you'll botch something, there's still a chance and verizon won't support you if you have problems with your modified phone but you can also return your phone to stock fairly easily if you do have any problems.

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

Damn! I have a lot to learn! I guess it will all come in time. I did like the Sense UI and wish it were on Droid, but I wasnt gonna touch the Eris, Droid all the way! I've heard theres an app that will make the droid look like the Nexus One. Is this true? That Nexus One is looking pretty sweet!

 

[PJnc284]

yeah, there's a lot of info out there. It's well worth it so read up and take it slowly. I wouldn't jump in the deep end right off the bat. Think I had my phone a month before I decided to root and try a custom rom. I've stuck with Pete's Bugless Beast roms and this new 0.7 ESE53 rom just blows my mind. The droid is a good phone stock but these custom roms are

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

is it as easy to install that stuff is it was for Blackberry OS's?

 

[pops.comp]

is it as easy to install that stuff is it was for Blackberry OS's?

Its not super difficult, I used DroidMod for a while, which did everything for you, but if you go to the ROMs/Hacks subforums they have step by step youtube walkthroughs posted..

I'd say its easier then installing leaked BB OSes..but thats just me

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

Droids are here! now gotta figure out how to set these things up!

 

[duffer900]

Such an exciting time....

 

[kevpowerhouse2]

Yep! Hell, i havent even used the phone except to start it up and the start up is pretty amazing!