Last Friday my wife and I received our new Droids, and after using it pretty intensely over the weekend, these are some of my overall impressions. I won’t even attempt at making this post exhaustive – instead I’ll try and post some follow-ups on things like what apps I’ve found useful (or not) and so on.

I must say that I wasn’t initially sold on getting a Droid – the Google Nexus One is supposed to be coming to Verizon sometime this Spring, and knowing that it has more memory, faster processor, a newer version of Android, etc. I was very tempted to just wait. However, just as decision-time was looming reports started to emerge that the Droid would soon be upgraded to the same, newer version of Android (2.1). Also, the Nexus One has definitely had its share of issues for early-adopters, so ultimately I decided to go with the slightly older but seemingly more reliable Droid.

Initial Setup

Setup was relatively painless for me, already having had a Google account. I had sync’d all of my contacts from my old Blackberry to my Google account using Google Sync, and I had already “cleaned up” my address books in anticipation of importing them to the new phone. You may notice I referred to address books. That’s because I’m taking advantage of one of the key features of Android 2.0 or newer, the ability to connect with multiple Google accounts.

I use Gmail for both my personal and work email, calendar, etc. but with separate accounts. Initially, I was worried about how this would go – would I end up with many duplicate contacts because some people appear in both contacts lists? Would I be able to specify where new contacts are saved when I create them on the phone? How would calendars work?

All my fears were laid to rest as I set up the phone, first with my personal account, then adding my work one. Android does a great job of combining duplicate contacts while still allowing you to un-join them if it makes a mistake or if you want them to remain distinct. When you start to add a new contact, it immediately asks which account to create it under.

One slight disappointment is that the calendar only syncs with the primary account on the phone, my personal account in my case. However, since I had already set up calendar sharing between my work and personal accounts I am still able to view, edit, and add to my work calendars. Disaster averted.

Kudos

I’m incredibly impressed with the inherent flexibility of the Android OS. The commercials for the MyTouch 3G (which also uses Android) that tout the system’s myriad personalization options are really spot-on. Within a couple days, I already have a setup that is very usable and customized to my taste. I’ll write more about this when I blog about apps.

The touch screen is great. This is the first touch device I’ve owned and I’ve always been a bit leery, especially of onscreen keyboards. However, the screen is so responsive and the virtual keyboard so good that I find myself rarely using the physical keyboard.

Google Maps and Google Voice integration are awesome. The navigation app is simply game-changing (no wonder Garmin’s stock dropped significantly once Google introduced it!)

Some other highlights:

• Threaded SMS messaging
• Push support for Gmail
• Great call quality
• Very good voice recognition

Gripes

Of course, nothing is perfect, not even shiny new tech-toys. There is always room for improvement, and these are just a few of the things I’ve run into already that leave me wanting more:

Groups support – Gmail itself does a great job of supporting contact groups, allowing you to send messages to groups, arrange contacts, etc. Android’s support of groups is incredibly rudimentary. All you seem to be able to do is filter your contacts by choosing which groups sync from your Gmail accounts and which groups are hidden. Even then, it is a multi-step process that’s more work that it’s worth. I can’t set ringtones based on group membership, I can’t send emails or SMS texts to groups, and I can’t even modify what groups that contacts are members of. This is the biggest FAIL I’ve come across thus far …

Notifications – I’m surprised to say this, but my old Blackberry Curve did a much better job of managing notifications than the Droid. On the Blackberry there was a single menu section for specifying all the many notifications – phone calls, text messages, email accounts, etc. You could set up multiple notification profiles and easily enable them from the home screen. In comparison, the notifications subsystem in Android is much more rudimentary. Within each app, I can control its notifications, and there are some system-wide settings for ringtones and such but no support for multiple profiles. Once notifications are set, all you can do is adjust notification volume, turn off audible alerts (leaving only apps that would normally vibrate), and turn off both audible and vibrating alerts. I’m really disappointed that I can’t set up a more specialized vibration profile, but it seems I may have to find “an app for that” …

Physical Keyboard – One of the bragging rights of this phone is that it has a physical keyboard. However, it sucks. Seriously. I loved the keyboard on my Blackberry. Despite its tiny keys, I could quickly and accurately type what I needed. At first I thought it might just be a learning curve issue, but then I tried the onscreen keyboards (both in portrait and landscape mode) and found them much more usable and accurate. Including a physical keyboard on this device was a significant design decision by Motorola – you would think they would have made it worthwhile! It leaves me wishing they had left it out and saved a couple millimeters in thickness and reduced the mechanical complexity.

Bluetooth Voice Dialing – The last gripe I’ve got (for now) is that Android doesn’t support bluetooth voice dialing. Period. It’s just not there. I’ve done some research and this is simply a feature that isn’t implemented in Android (yet?). This is a huge disappointment for me, because I (did) usemy bluetooth headset for voice dialing all the time. The Droid does have a “Voice Dialing” app, which works very well. You just can’t use it with bluetooth. This seems like such an obvious oversight to me. Even my wife’s old LG enV2 had this feature. My old Motorola e815 that I had 3 years ago had it too. Bluetooth voice dialing pre-dates Android’s existence! Why is it not supported?!?!?! Argh.

Final Thoughts

Don’t take all my gripes to mean I don’t like the Droid – I still love it. It’s just that when a device has so much potential it’s hard not to notice the areas it falls flat on its face. I’m still finding it incredibly useful and overall a much more powerful device than my Blackberry. I still have some things I need to tweak (getting favorite mobile sites bookmarked, etc.) and more apps to play with, but I’m sure that will come with time.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts where I’ll talk more in depth about apps, Google Voice integration, and more!

This past Sunday after worship, the Richmond Church of the Brethren (CoB) celebrated the launch of its new website! This site has been months in the making, as it was in progress for quite some time before I became pastor in June.  You can check out the site to see all its exciting bells and whistles, including online calendars, a “conversations” blog, and online newsletter distribution. Since I did quite a bit of work getting the site finalized and ready for launch, I’ll talk about some of the more technical details of the site in the rest of this post.

The new site was set up and is hosted by Summersault database driven websites. There are several connections between Summersault and Richmond CoB, so they were a very logical choice. Summersault set up our server space, configured Drupal, an open-source content management system, and set up our preferred theme with some graphic-design tweaks. From that point the site was delivered to us to do any final design tweaks and to create the content.

(Working on getting this new site ready to launch has been another one of the reasons new content has been so sparse on my blog lately. Of course, buying a house may have something to do with my recent busyness as well.)

Calendar Setup

While Drupal has quite a bit of built-in event scheduling and calendaring functionality, both myself and the church’s office manager are committed Google Calendar junkies. While Drupal plays relatively nice with GCal, it isn’t quite as easy to use for recurring events, rescheduling things, and interfacing with other services and devices.

In the end we decided to use a combination of Drupal’s built in calendar and Google Calendar. Special events are scheduled using the Drupal site, while recurring events and more mundane things like when the church office is open, etc. are scheduled via GCal. Since Drupal exports an actively updated .ics file that GCal can subscribe to, I was able to set up a calendar display page that uses an embedded Google Calendar to display both sets of events at the same time. It sounds somewhat cumbersome, but at this point it’s the best compromise we were able to set up. For end users I think the experience will be relatively transparent.

CSS Tweaking

In addition to figuring out the finer details of how we were going to use the calendar, we also ran across several aspects of our chosen template that we wanted to tweak or change. Since a number of people in our community use Linux, I wanted to do what I could to make sure the site looked good on both Windows and Linux browsers. Since many Linux installs don’t include the same fonts as Windows, some aspects of the layout needed to be adjusted to make sure things lined up correctly when non-standard fonts were in use.

As I tweaked the CSS I also found myself banging my head against the wall a few times as I learned some of Drupal’s eccentricities. While Drupal is an amazingly configurable, adaptable, extensible piece of software, that sometimes results in complexity and a steep learning curve once you start to try and fiddle around “under the hood.” I made a few changes to the actual PHP and HTML code that makes up the template we’re using, but most of the changes I made were just in the CSS files.

What now?

Now that the site has officially been launched there will be some additional upkeep needed right from the start. We’re going to try and have an up-to-date list of upcoming worship themes and preachers on the “Worship” page, the calendar will need to be kept a bit more updated, and the Conversations blog will need attention if we really want it to be a place where conversation is taking place.

Because of Drupal’s expandable nature we have a number of options we may look into in the future for expanding the site. One popular possibility is to do some sort of sermon podcast, possibly with sermon texts available too. Another idea would be to have an area that those who help in various kinds of church leadership can use for collaborative planning and resource sharing.

Overall I’m excited about having the new site up and active. It will mean that my online attention will be stretched a little bit thinner with regards to blogging, now that I have 2 different sites vying for my writing attention. However I think that it may also be a generative experience, where I’ll be coming up with ideas that might not work just right for the church blog, but would be appropriate for this site. Only time will tell.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the new site! Let me know what you think, and if you’ve got any suggestions I’d love to hear them.

1. Gmail

Gmail is Google’s web-based email service. I’ve been using Gmail for the past two and a half years. It quickly replaced all other forms of email for me, and now all of my many email accounts (currently about 7) end up in Gmail. I originally thought that I would not like reading all of my mail through the web interface of Gmail and that I would instead download all my mail using a local program (such as Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.) since that is what I was used to. However, Gmail’s ability to make all of my email quickly and easily accessible from any computer with an internet connection won me over. I love being able to do a full-text search on all 12,000 (yes twelve thousand) emails I have stored in Gmail to quickly find what I want. And even with that many emails stored I am only using 7% of the 6.6 gigabytes I’ve been alloted. Wow.

2. Google Reader

If you’ve read my post on RSS then you’ll know I’m a big fan of Google Reader. Google reader serves as an aggregator for the news feeds published by many web sites. As those sites update their content Google Reader receives the content and makes it available to you without having to surf to the original web site. You can put your feeds into folders so if you only want to read tech news, blogs, or any other particular category you can easily sort through all of the posts. You can also view your reading trends and share items with other friends who use Google Reader. In addition, there’s an offline mode so you can read your news even when you don’t have an internet connection.

3.Remember the Milk

I’ll admit it, I’ve never been good at keeping to-do lists. I don’t remember to write things down or check them off. Thankfully Remember the Milk (aka RTM) has come to my rescue. RTM makes to-do lists fun for the geek in me. Their website is extremely easy to use and they have plug-ins and services for many different platforms and applications including Gmail, Google Calendar and iGoogle. By having RTM show up right beside my Gmail inbox I can remind myself to keep it up to date and do what’s on it. My wife and I both use RTM and we can share tasks like chores so that we’re both kept up to date on what needs to be done around the house. I could go on and on about how great RTM is but I’ll save that for another post. Of course you could always just sign up for a free account and try it yourself!

4. Jott

If it weren’t for Remember the Milk I probably never would have given Jott a try. Jott is a free online “speech to text” application that you use with your cell phone. There’s a toll free number you call in on and from there you can use voice prompts and natural speech to do things like send emails and text messages, or even update your RTM to-do list or Google Calendar. Recently Jott has started to add links with sites like Amazon, Twitter, and even WordPress to enable users to do all sorts of things by just using their voice. I particularly like using Jott with my cell phone’s hands-free headset or speakerphone to send messages and set up to-do items at times I otherwise couldn’t, like when I’m driving down the road. Safety first!

5. Google Calendar

At the risk of this post turning into a Google love-fest my fifth indispensable web-app is Google Calendar. Google Calendar (or Gcal for short) helps me to keep track of the many different things I’ve got going on as a student leader, husband, employee, and human being with a social life. It puts many different calendars within easy reach and allows me to only see the ones I need at any given moment. It also has some rudimentary collaboration and free/busy features that help others figure out what is going on in my life as well. I admit I don’t use Gcal to its full ability but it is still one of the apps I couldn’t live without.

What web-apps do you find indispensable, if any? Are there some you wish you could love but just can’t seem to get into? Let’s hear about it in the comments.