David's Blog

I drove into town yesterday to have a look at the new Droid X smart phone. I spent an hour or so before I left reading about it on the net. I had the features down pat, and made a list of all the gizmo's and gadgets one might need to indulge in all that the phone has to offer. You know, a plastic case, so when I drop it, it does not break; a car dash holder charger; an in house docking charger; and various cables.

I read about not being able to synchronize the unit with my pictures, music and social data from the computer unless I got a free ware program off the net, or in my case a program I already have called "Sailing Media" that I used for the Palm Pre Plus that I tried out for a few days.

All toll, it would cost $600.00 less a $100.00 rebate. Now that seems like a hefty chunk of change, but you have to consider that you are purchasing a hand held computer, not a phone. Personally, I could care less about the phone part of it. Heck, I still have a problem figuring out what to do when I receive a call on my Blackberry Storm.

So I am in the store, waited my turn in line to "play" with the display unit. It looked good, felt good in the hand, all the fancy features worked as advertised, and it was easy to navigate the various screens. I finally got to my "acid test", how fast web pages loaded; what they looked like; was it a real computer like experience and did it have tabbed web page capability.

I went to the Google news page, chose the Sci-tech page and loaded an article about the Droid x that I had been to on this computer. Well, I waited and waited and waited.

If I am in town where there is a max 3G signal and I have to see "requesting", "waiting", "loading" and more than a few seconds pass until I see what I want to see, then at home it will be even worse.

I put the thing down and left. I guess that a 1 GH processor has nothing to do with web browsing.

So now I am back to the waiting mode, hoping the new iPod touch comes out later this year with everything the iPhone has less the phone. It would be nice if Apple would make the iPod touch 3G capable and universal so one could choose which carrier to go to to purchase a data plan; but I am sure that is out of the question.

I might mention that two things irritate me. One is why Verizon sells their phones in the store with a rebate. I was going to go to Best Buy to get the Droid X, had I purchased one because you purchase the phone there less the rebate.

The other irritating thing is iTunes. Why does Apple "not" make it available to all platforms? The could generate tons of revenue selling books, songs, movies and "stuff" to all the smart phone market, not just their iPhone/iPod market. They should at least allow competitor devices to synchronize to the iTunes library on our computers with whatever device we want.