Motorola Droid - Android 2.1 Update

Looks like the Android 2.1 update is finally starting to hit the Motorola Droid's! Personally I have been fine with 2.0 though some of the features & graphical changes in 2.1 should be nice. I've not yet gotten the update and have no plans on manually installing till the update hits my phone automatically.

Below is a release schedule per the droid geet [dot] com:

-At noon on 03/30, 1,000 users will receive notification of the update.
-At 11:59 PM on 03/30, 9,000 more users will receive the update notification.
After the first 10,000 users receive the update on 03/30, there will be a 24-hour period when no additional upgrades will be delivered.
-On Day 3 (04/01), 200,000 users will receive the update notification at 11:59 PM. This schedule will continue each day thereafter until the update has been delivered to all users.

A full list of features and changes in 2.1 are listed from Verizon Wireless:
http://support.vzw.com/pdf/system_update/moto_droid.pdf

Motorola Droid - Otterbox

To all of you fellow Motorola Droid owners out there that are in need of a case Otterbox has just released a case for the Motorola Droid out of their Commuter Series. I am a huge fan of Otterbox products as they've always serves me well. I've used their products for my ITouch and my Palm Treo Pro. It just came out on their website today as being available and I just ordered it. I'll post a small review once it comes in.

http://www.otterbox.com/motorola-cases/droid-by-motorola-cases/droid-by-motorola-commuter-series-case/

Hmmm....CD/DVD Drive Dead...What to do? Answer: unetbootin

With what little free time I have these days I've slowly been trying to get my Mame cabinet back in order. For any of you that don't know the history of my Mame cabinet I purchased the Mame cabinet completely built already but outdated. It had an old arcade monitor with severe burn-in from years of Ms Pacman. And the computer inside was an old Pentium I that was running DOS. Without going to far in depth in this particular post I took out that old box and replaced with a much more advanced PC. It was running Windows XP. The other night I decided that it was time to switch back to an old friend: Linux Mint.

No big deal, just downloaded the latest distro of Mint and burned a copy to a CD. After some extended reaching inside of the cabinet trying to reach the DVD drive I found that the computer would not boot on the CD. After a few minutes of trouble shooting it became fairly evident that the drive was not working. It would start to read the disc but just give up.

So, I went to my key chain and pulled off my 2gig memory stick that I keep with me for emergencies and decided to go with putting Mint on it instead. Did a quick bit of research and looking in the BIOS to confirm that my motherboard supported booting to a USB device which it would.

Next, since it's not something I really deal with much I had to find how I was going to put it on the USB drive. Did a quick google and the first thing that came up was: unetbootin

Now again I don't have a whole lot of experience looking for software like this but I was very pleased with what I found. Not only would it take an ISO and put it on a USB drive but it comes with built-in support for automatically downloading many different Linux & BSD Distro's. Ubunta, Debian, Mint, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD, and many others. I noticed such as in Mint that maybe one or more are a version behind but I just thought that was an outright cool idea. They also allow direct installation straight on to a local hard drive. And of course you can you pretty much any distro that you can find a ISO for.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki

Bought some Droids

Well, I am happy to say that my wife and I both are happy owners of Motorola Droids. And I can honestly say from both my experience so far and what I've heard from my wife that we are both very happy.

I'm not going to get in to a big review on the Droid because trust me there are plenty out there. But as I said in my prior blog I was really stuck in a dilemma as to whether or not to get the Droid or wait for the Nexus One or Incredible.

The reason we finally pulled the trigger on the Droid is this:

1) At the time I'm writing this there is still no 100% guarantee as to when the Nexus One or Incredible are coming out. Though I'm seeing from a lot of sources the Nexus One will be next week it's still not gospel.

2) Bang for the buck: We both knew that we were going to stay with Verizon. Where we live and travel they generally have much better signal then AT&T or Sprint. So we didn't mind signing a new contract with them. That being said with our new contract we basically are getting one of the two Droids for free. That was a big deal to me. I knew the Droid would do what I needed in a smart phone and my wife who is not so much on the technical side is really interested in starting to get that way. She's a nurse and she has friends that have either Iphones or other types of smart phones with all kinds of cool nursing apps and she felt that she wanted to give that a try. So getting a deal where one phone would be free was definitely an incentive.

3) The screen: It's a little large screen then the Nexus One. Not much but if you search around the web you'll find that it's enough to make a difference when looking at web pages. Also the screen type on the Droid is supposed to be much easier to see outside. I watched couple videos and saw that the Droid next to the Nexus One there was a noticeable difference outside. Which mattered quite a bit to me as I plan to use mine for GPS related stuff and also I'm a big outdoors person and I will definitely have the phone with me.

As I use the phone more I'll be sure to share anything that I come up with. But in the end when it came to buying these phones yesterday I just knew that I'd had enough with my old smart phone which was costing me $30 extra a month to have a data plan on a phone that I had no interest in using. So it was time for a change. No the hardware may not be quite what the Nexus One is (at least without overclocking after rooting) but I don't really care. From where I came from it's a dream and in another year there will be phones out that will make the Nexus One and Incredible look slow.

Being happy and productive was the end result of this choice.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Just wanted to wish all of you fellow Bloggers out there a Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

I highly recommend to all of you out there to take a break and have a drink (alcohol or non-alcohol doesn't really matter). The point is to just try and relax a little bit this evening.

I think in the IT &/or Telecom fields we get so wrapped up in our jobs that we can sometimes forget that we just need a break from time to time. So why not use this St. Patrick's Day as an excuse for that break :)

Just be safe this holiday and don't drink and drive :)

Pulling the Trigger on a Purchase

So, the time is coming soon for me to buy a new cell phone. What I know I want is a phone running the Android operating system. Also, I am on the Verizon wireless network so you would think that would help me determine which one I am going to get since there aren't a whole lot of options yet in the Verizon network. Pretty much I've got the HTC Droid Eris or the Motorola Droid.

But here's the thing. The rumor out there right now is that the Nexus One will soon be available for Verizon. More specifically the rumor is March 23rd 2010. Then there is the rumor that the HTC Incredible will also be sold by Verizon soon and will also be running the Andriod OS.

Since late last year I wanted to buy a new smart phone. About this time last year I bought a Palm Treo Pro that is running Windows Mobile. To say the least I've not been real impressed. Though it has a lot of functionality the phone itself has locked up more times then I can count and has always been slow to respond to commands.

But I'm not writing this blog about the likes or dislikes of the different phones. More to the point I'm trying to express a problem that I find myself in quite a bit when it comes to buying technology. I see something I want so I do a lot of research on it. No big deal there, researching a product is something I'd recommend when buying any product for the first time. But what happens to me is that I read the pros and cons then I find that there is another product that will be coming out soon that will be even better then the product I first started researching.

This was true for me when I was considering the HTC Droid Eris. I heard about the Motorola Droid coming out soon so I thought "hey...I should wait and see what this new phone is going to be like". So I waited and it came out and I started doing even more research on the Motorolla Droid. After a while I ended up finding out that there was a possibility of the Nexus One coming to the Verizon network and I thought "hey wouldn't be even better to go all the way and get an actual Google phone?". So I started doing research on the Nexus One when I found that the HTC Incredible would eventually be coming to Verizon as well and there were some benefits to this phone over the Nexus One.

My point to this drawn out blog is that I constantly find myself not buying but just waiting. So I still have my old Windows Mobile phone that I am not happy with. And what will happen when the Nexus One or the Incredible come out? Will I actually own one of those or the Motorola Droid? Or will I suddenly find a phone that may come out later in the year that will be even better then any of those options?

When do you finally just say "this is good enough for what I need it to do right now". I mean come on! There is always going to be something better coming out soon. Especially in regards to technology anything you buy on the market is already out of date because they are already building another product to replace the one they just sent out.

I just have a really hard time spending money on something knowing that 6 months from now something better will be out. And unfortunately I don't have the capital to just go out and replace what I've got with something newer constantly. Also as many of my friends know when it comes to spending money I have a really bad habit of procrastinating.

How do you handle these kinds of situations? I'd be interested in hearing any of your thoughts on how you reason when to buy a new product.

Some links to the products I've been talking about:

HTC Droid Eris

Motorola Droid

Nexus One

HTC Incredible

Tron Legacy

This is a bit off topic but I had to post that a new trailer for Tron Legacy is out. It's actually been out for a couple days already I just was late getting it on here. I had the pleasure of going to watch Alice in Wonderland in 3D the other night and I got to see this trailer in 3D. All I can saw it "WOW!!!" I cannot wait.

I feel this movie is fairly relevant to this blog because I'm sure many of us who started in computers in the 70's or 80's were wrapped up in the first Tron movie. I remember watching it with such huge eyes in amazement.

Upcoming Topics - Desktops & Laptops

Over the coarse of the next week or two I am planning on writing reviews on a few new computers that I've recently gotten my hands on. I will be giving a full review of the products starting from the received shipment package all the way to the finished product.

Below is a list of what I'll be reviewing:

• HP Pavilion dv6t Quad Edition Laptop
• HP Touchsmart 600-1055 Series All-in-one touchscreen Desktop / HTPC
• Acer Aspire Revo AR3610-U9022 Nettop / HTPC

I'll be sure to include plenty of pics and hopefully some bench mark tests as well as a full list of specs for each machine.

I've been behind the times a bit when it comes to new computers so I'm looking forward to really digging in to these more while writing my reviews of the products.

Registered Domain

Just as an FYI I have registered the domain http://www.telecom-and-it.com

At this time it is just point to this blogger but I wanted to go ahead and have this domain saved for possible future growth. Plus help give me an incentive to keep things rolling here.