Well, I finally have left prepaid! I got a droid, and I couldn't be happier! I'm totally excited because the phone actually requires a little brainpower to learn how to use it.

So, I have a question for someone who has one. Are there any MUST HAVE APPS? I want to know which apps you find useful, and also the ones that are a waste of space.

Thanks in Advance for your input
-Smiley

Well, since I've had mine since it came out, i have a few apps that will never leave my droid.

Launcher Pro Beta - A replacement home screen, which is WAY smoother than the stock android home.

Handcent SMS - Replaces the stock messaging app. Once again, way better with a ton more options.

KeyRing Reward Cards - Scan the barcode on your reward card (Albertsons, Ace) and it remembers it, and when it needs scanned it displays the barcode on the screen for the business.

DroidLight LED Flashlight - Makes your droid a flashlight.

My Verizon - Easy Enough

Zedge Ringtones & Wallpapers - Free ringtones and wallpapers.

Advanced Task Killer - For when your phone gets slow, kill background apps.

Beautiful Widgets - Huge clock widget, with weather and a few other widgets.

Battery Indicator ProDROID - Gives you a percentage of remaining battery, versus a stupid image which is not accurate.

If you need help, just email me and ill send ya my number. So if u need to ask a question, you can just text me.

Does the flashlight app use the FLASH on the camera? If so, holy cow that thing is bright. I'm going to start checking those out now... This phone is a godsend though. I absolutely thought I was in heaven when I got my sidekick 3 limited edition diane von furstenburg... THIS IS LIKE the 5th level of heaven. I almost died when I scanned a barcode LOL

Thank you verizon for not being quite so dumb on this one.

Yup, it uses the Dual LED flash on the back. Don't forget to turn it off though.

Yeah. I was so happy to get this phone. @ Wal-mart it was 48.88 with a new contract, which I had to get. Cellular plus is still selling it for $99 AFTER a $100 mail in rebate. Plus, they were pretty rude to me at the store in Billings.

If I have anymore q's I'll shoot you an e-mail.

kk

I love Swype:



It's not in the app store yet though, have to go to http://www.swypeinc.com/ to get it.

I like "weather bug". Does anyone know about accessories for their Droid? Wondering about the docks which you can use to charge the battery...looks like there are two types, ones more for viewing videos, weather, alarm clock and connects to your computer, the other more for charging. Another important item is a "skin" or a cover for the face of your Droid to help prevent scratches and such. Curious too if anyone has any other accessories that they like.

Advanced App Killer is great, use it frequently and your battery life is really extended. I also use the Weather Channel app for a radar picture, and love Google Maps, use it for navigation and to find nearby places when I travel. Sadly I use about 3% of the phones potential.

Levi, I put the Swype beta on my phone last night and all I have to say is wow! I'm still getting the hang of it but it's a great keyboard. Hopefully it won't cost too much when it comes out of beta.

As for apps I use a lot my primary ones are Slacker Radio (like Pandora), NubiNews Reader for news, TV.com for CNET videos, and Advanced Task Killer.

Paper Toss is a fun game. So is Coloroid.

I'm sure there are many I've forgotten.

Yeah, I had another beta version for a few weeks and then it expired when they came out with this open beta and I felt like my phone was unusable until I could get the new one installed. I have never paid more than $2 for an app but I would pay $15-20 for Swype and not think twice.

I agree with Levi and Dan. The Swype keyboard may be the pinnacle of human achievement.
The launcher program that Josh mentioned is pretty great, too.

I also use:

CalWidget - This puts your appointments from google calendar on one of your homescreens. If you use Google Calendar a lot, this app is almost a necessity.

Timeriffic - This program can be set up to adjust your phone's ring settings based on time. So if you don't want your phone to notify you of a new email at night, you can set it to turn off notifications from 11pm to 7am or something.

Movies (by Flixter) - Shows movie times and reviews. I don't know if it works for the Miles City theater, but it works great for finding where a movie is playing in Billings.

DialerOne - if you have a ton of contacts, this is a nice phone dialer replacement. You can start dialing numbers and it will show all the contacts that match that number. But more importantly, you can dial your contact's name (using t9) and it will list the contacts who match that name. For example, I can type 255(A-L-L in T9), it will list all my contacts named Allen. Since I don't know anyone's phone number, it's a faster way to dial. I think it's faster than scrolling through all my contacts.

Here is my top 30, or so, list in no order:
Dolphin Browser
Contacts GroupU
Handscent
Advance Task Killer
AndFTP
Astrid Tasks
Barcode Scanner
bTunes
DroidRecord
Facebook
GMail
JuiceDefender
LiveScores
Pandora
PdaNet
PhoneMyPC
PicSay Pro
ESPN ScoreCenter
Shazam
ShopSavvy
Skype Mobile
Google Talk
TouchDown
Twidroid
Uninstaller
Google Voice
WeatherBug Elite
Beautiful Widgets

Let me know if you have questions as well...would be glad to help. The Droid community is amazing...I would also suggest you register for a few of the better Droid forums:

http://www.droidforums.net/
http://androidforums.com/motorola-droid/
http://www.motorola-droid.org/

Jeff

There are 2 droid docks. One is for in the car, for GPS and things like that. One is for your bedside, the "MediaDock". I have the mediadock and use it nightly, and I love it. When you dock it, 5 minutes later it goes to black with green text for the clock. Not hard on your eyes, and works wonderful as a loud alarm clock.

DJB...to answer your question, here are some of the extras I have for my phone. I don't have the dock as I felt it is primarily used for the GPS. I do have the BodyGlove phone protector...very nice and good feel. I have dropped my soul, I mean Droid many times without a scratch or anything. I also have the screen protectors and they work very well...I actually should replace the one I have on (have had it on there for about 5 months). Probably the most important extra I have purchased is an extra battery which came with its own charger so I can charge just the battery. You will find that with extensive use of your phone, it may only last about 8 hours. With typical use it should last over 12. When I am on the road and/or have Bluetooth going, I usually go thru a battery within 8 hours...so having two batteries has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. Hope this helps.

Josh, I didn't know that about the docks. How much does the media dock run?

Would the processing speed of the phone affect how well Swype works? It is a cool concept, maybe with some practice it will grow on me.

Coach, it ran 40 dollars... i think? It's on VZW.com, under the phones accessories list...


Richard, if you have a rooted overclocked amazingness phone, like i do, it runs faster (1.2GHZ) than the iPhone or evo4G, and more stable.

Hmm... I thought it was sort of a yes or no question.
Swype isn't going to work for mw on this phone. And if it drops one more call it will be cast in to the sagebrush for some prairie dog to find and use. I'm giving serious consideration to going back to simple nokia flip-phone with no camera and a yellow legal pad. Grrr

And another thing, based on my experience with both OS's there is no way in hell that an Android phone is more stable than an iPhone.

Hey Richard,
I don't know how well Swype works on an Eris. That's what you have, right? Swype definitely affects performance on my Moto Droid, so on a slower processor, I can see it having problems. Also, with a lower screen resolution it might not work as well.
The performance issue might be fixed when Eris gets upgraded to Android 2.2. Actually, I don't know if the Eris is getting the upgrade.
It would be too bad if you couldn't use the Swype keyboard. I had the same problem that Levi had when I didn't have Swype for a couple days a few weeks ago. The stock keyboard is almost unusable after using Swype.
You could try using ShapeWriter (available for free from the Marketplace). It's kind of a generic Swype type keypboard. It might work better on the Eris.

As far as system stability is concerned, I haven't had too many problems with my Droid, but I had a Win Mobile phone before this, so my standards might be a little low.

Eris has been discontinued by Verizon, which means no Android 2.2 for it. Swype doesn't hurt my droid at all, but that is due to being overclocked.

Seems to be a lot of people on this forum that have been using Swype on their Eris.

http://androidforums.com/...d-wtf.html

Some of them had rooted their phones and upgraded to 2.1 but I don't think that all of them have.

Richard - I talked to a friend of mine that has an Eris and he says Swype works just fine on it.

I pulled the battery out of my phone last night and completely restarted it and swype appears to be working okay.

I came across a pretty good deal on extra batteries on Ebay. Two batteries plus a charger for $10.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eB...0131121041

Seems too good to be true but for $10 it's worth a shot in my book. It ships direct from Hong Kong so I'll know if I got taken in a couple of weeks. They have almost 30k feedbacks on Ebay and 99% are positive so here's hoping.

What does "rooted" mean in relation to Android phones? Is it like jailbroken for the iPhone?