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I managed to pick up a damaged Droid2Global before we left the states, and sell off my Droid X because it would be a brick if we got out here. I’m kinda glad we didnt get the high risk insurance on it, because i took such great care of that phone it’d have been a waste – I’m sure the new owner will love it. The D2G turned out to be easily fixable by SBFing back to stock and re-upgrading to Gingerbread, so I actually got a great deal on it.

I ended up using it the last 2 weeks on Verizon with CyanogenMod on it, which I adored. Upon our arrival to Australia, my Dad had arranged to get us a couple of Telstra (the only network with reliable service where they live) SIM cards which I tried to activate in the D2G without much luck.

I ended up figuring out that CyanogenMod wasn’t asking me for the SIM unlock code (Verizon subsidize the phone, so you have to ask their permission to use the SIM slot), so I SBFed back again and entered the code without issue and I was able to call and text, but no data.

It took me a couple days of Googling to figure out that Telstra have a smartphone configuration site – I put my details in as having a Milestone 2 (apparently the closest relative to the D2G) and it sent the configuration over. Still nothing.

I tried again from a desktop PC with wifi off on the phone, and suddenly the 3G came up. I ended up putting it on GSM only, because it doesn’t seem any slower than Verizon and the UTMS eats battery like noone’s business.

It’ll take some getting used to with not having unlimited texting and data, but so far i’m liking it. I haven’t tried CM7 again now the SIM on the radio is unlocked, but I may give that a shot. In fact now I think of it, simply sending the config over from Telstra’s website may have done the trick.

I feel like I’ve been mucking around with HandBrake for days…

We have some DVDs of Yo Gabba Gabba that Duncan’s absolutely batshit over, and since they won’t work during our trip to Australia, I’m trying to rip them to play on my phone for the plane trip and such. I finally arrived at a group of settings that allowed the video to play, but it keeps stopping about a minute in, and my whole phone freezes and needs a battery pull.

I’ve tried a couple of different media player apps too, thinking that maybe there’s just something wrong with the one on CyanogenMod7 – to no avail. The best one thus far is mVideoPlayer, which lasted a good three minutes before freezing, and which did allow me to get to the applications menu and force-stop it. I would seriously consider paying for either it or arcMedia, if it would just play the files (plus not having it pop up with weird adsense text like “Web-Est.com auto body shop estimating software” would be a boon), but I want to make sure it’s going to fix the problem.

At the moment I’m trying to scale back the video quality to see if that helps – maybe it’s a memory/buffer issue? Not sure.

So because we may be spending some time outside of Verizon’s service area, and our phones are still under contract, Sabriena is giving up her phone to her sister, who will be taking over the contract (rather than buying another phone and signing another new contract).

Sabriena’s sister then gave her the Droid 2 she’s had a while that had a bad ESN, so that Sabriena would have something to use while she feeds the baby and such. I went through and set it up, and once I figured out how to bypass the activation on it, we got her all set up with Google Voice so she can text me if she has to. She’s running over WiFi, which means it won’t work if she leaves the house – but that’s not that big of a deal and it gets us out from under the contract with Verizon for the time being.

I don’t really know what crack the advertiser thing on it is smoking though, because one of the AdMob things that came up was something like “checkcity.com payday advance loan” – presumably some sort of geolocation fail based on our Wifi network.

I’ve had the hacked pre-release version of Gingerbread on my Droid X for a while now, and I’ve been meaning to flash it off due to bugs… but just haven’t gotten around to it. Apparently there’s an OTA going around, so I’m waiting to see what goes on with it so I don’t wind up flashing my phone more often than is necessary.

But there’s a few people out there (I started out titling this post something like “Is the Android community completely retarded?” but I changed it because it’s not representative of the majority at all) who are just freaks… alleging that the new OTA is a hoax because they haven’t got it, or that VZW’s support people don’t know anything about it (VZW’s phone people don’t know anything, I had one tell me that the Droid2 was going to have LTE). There’s even the odd jack-off saying something stupid like that this new version will spy on tethered users.

Here’s the thing – determining that there is multiple devices (or even just one unexpected device) from behind a mobile device is not hard if you’re the carrier. I wouldn’t be surprised if VZW needed any kind of software on your phone at all to be able to tell you were tethering, they could tell from turning on deep packet inspection to the worst bandwidth offenders. Bam, they can instantly identify people “stealing tethering service”.

Something that is bugging me about this GB ROM I’m using though… I think the auto-brightness is busted, because it’s incredibly hard to read outside on a nice day. Droid Xs with LCDs aren’t the greatest full-sun readers to begin with, but I don’t recall having this much of a hard time with it.

Between that, the dropping texts/calls, I really need to do something with this phone… I just don’t want to flash it, take the OTA, then have to re-flash to get it rooted or something.

I’ve had my Droid X for a couple months now, it’s completely paid off (though I’m still under contract for the rest of the non-principal payment) and I’m still happily running the first leak of FroYo for it. I literally haven’t ran into any problems with it (in fact my phone is quite delicious, I rebooted it yesterday for the first time in 9 days thinking it might solve a problem with Facebook’s shitty app – it didn’t) to warrant trying to upgrade.

… but it seems like the assault on Moto’s locked bootloader appears to be waning, judging by the Twitter accounts of various people involved. They all seem to be interested in other phones at the moment and the Droid X/2′s boot loaders appear to have fallen out of vogue as the target to break.

I’m still waiting on Moto to get their shit together on the official OTA update before I flash back to stock and go the legitimate upgrade… apparently the OTA has caused issues for some folks, and doesn’t really do anything my phone doesn’t already do right now – since I’m not having issues, I’m not going to mess around with trying to upgrade to something that’s essentially the same and perhaps cause myself some headaches.

I’ve thought about skinning my phone to make it a little different – I actually want to try my hand at designing my own skin myself, maybe some dark circle cream background action to look like a cross between the Matrix city of Zion and crop circles… but honestly I am just not motivated to. Any customization has the potential to cause issues with what is as of right now a completely trouble-free device. I think it’d just be about the dumbest thing to do, mucking about with it until there’s some feature I absolutely can’t live without.

It would be nice if the hackers got back to the Moto boot loader so I could run a fully custom Android on my phone though…

Angry Birds is released for Android for free – and I highly recommend you grab it. When I first saw it, I figured it was some asshole pirating it and that I’d just wait for it to come out, but this looks legit. It’s ad-supported at the moment, so while you’re playing there will pop up ads for juvederm and other nonsense in the bottom right corner, but eventually there will be a paid version that removes ads. If I have the money and haven’t worn it out by that point, I fully intend on indulging myself. These cartoony-physics games are brilliantly simple to pick up and before you know if you’ve pissed away countless hours on it. What we need is for the developer of Fantastic Contraption to build an Android version. Plz o plz o plz!

I’ve managed to find a couple of things I don’t really care for about the Droid X… but on the whole I’m really digging this damn phone.

The first thing I don’t particularly care for is how stupid hot the damn thing gets when you’re using it a lot. I’m thinking it might be the CDMA radio in it, because certain apps make it heat up fast while others you can use the thing for ages with minimal heat. The MSN app I was using for example, 30 minutes and it was uncomfortable.

As I write this post, however, the heat is barely noticeable. Not that the WordPress app isn’t fraught with it’s own difficulties…

Another issue is that two of it’s features are apparently broken. I can’t get the smart profile (turn the phone on it’s face to silence), nor the double tap to silence to work at all. Probably for the best, as some folks have had it never ring again after that (might be third party app related).

Finally, the firmware on the X from Motorola is patently terrible. Work is in progress for folks to get custom ROMs to boot, but not yet. I rooted my X simply to remove some of the bloatware – I am never going to pay for Blockbuster or city ID so I should be able to remove those fucking icons, right?

Apparently the X benchmarks a good bit slower than it should too, likely the remnants of Blur on a non-blur phone are to blame for that, or perhaps the lack of FrozenYoghurt. I’ve not really experienced any lag though, for the most part it’s a dream to use.

Still though, an option for vanilla android would be nice from companies who keep polluting the homogenous experience with their own UI tweaks. If I can get an almost vanilla Froyo on it, and add apps from there, I think I’ll be much happier.

My brother in law was petty psyched about the “places” feature, after I showed him how it worked… he spent about ten seconds screaming “KFC” at it, before I showed him “places”. Out with the family on that road-trip Branson vacation, and the needle’s starting to point to E? Bring up the gas station finder, complete with compass directions and the ability to plug it straight into turn by turn navigation. That’s cool.

The camera leaves a lot to be desired, the advertised 8MP had me thinking I might never use my DSC again… but alas, no. The mechanical shutter is nice but it’s still very obviously a camera-phone. The panoramic view thing worked pretty well even though I tried it in really low light… I can’t see me using very often though unless I magically figure out how to work the camera into taking decent pics. The flash also seems to wash out the images too easy, particularly with macro shots – also my main gripe about my DSC.

The GPS radio bug is pretty fucking annoying too – in fact for a while there I was genuinely tempted to call up and inquire about exchanging the phone because of the heat and battery issues. Turning the GPS off is a pain in the arse, but at least it can go more than five hours without a charge.

Update:I’ve played with the GPS, and while I can “reproduce” the bug, I don’t notice it in terms of battery life. I’m getting about 13-15 hours between charges out of it, and I mostly can’t put it down. I got about 5 hours of MP3 playback out of it with around 50% battery – turn off MP3s and the battery drain flatlines as expected, despite the fact the debug screen’s “running” is pegged at 100%.

One really good thing about the software, Swype. It takes a little getting used to, and there are a lot of small tricks you pick up over time (like swyping up to capitalize a first letter) but the most important thing is to just relax and scribble. It’s border-line creepy the regularity with which swype can figure out what you intended to say, so don’t sit and watch each word get entered… just go nuts scribbling with a light touch as fast as you can and then make a second sweep through to fix any errors.

It also works great with your thumb – the other day I managed to bust out a tweet using only my thumb with swype while I had my arms full of groceries waiting in line to check out. I was pretty impressed with how few errors I made and how easy it was to pilot the device with my least-deft minor digit.

Other minor grievances with this phone I suspect may be android specific platform wide issues. I would frequently leave my WinMo handset plugged in via USB to conserve battery life – no can do with the Droid. Unless you chose to have it on USB only, android OS will unmount the SD card while your PC has access to it. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason for that, but it stops any custom alerts from working. Maybe there’s a way to store those alerts on the phone’s memory instead and avoid this issue, but I, was quite annoyed to miss an email by about ten minutes because of it.

On the whole though, this phone is pretty kick-ass, and I’m not really upset I didn’t get a full QWERTY with it.