Are Droid email / calendar and other basic features really so poorly implemented?
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I went out and bought the new Motorola / Verizon / Google Droid last week. I’m a long-term Blackberry and Trio user who has resisted getting an iPhone since the Verizon network works a lot better her in the Bay Area and I need my mobile device to be good at email and calendar functions.
Most of the reviews of the droid last were were for the phone as a personal consumer device. My hope was, that with a slide out keyboard this would be the killer device that could bridge the gap between Blackberry and iphone – that is it would do a good job at text-centric functions like email like the blackberry does, but also have the touch interface and consumer / Web 2.0 features of the iphone.
What I’ve not seen widely reviewed, and I’ve founding very lacking, is the use of the phone in a business context – which turns out to me to be very hampered by the very primitive nature of the e-mail and calendar apps built into the phone. I've also found annoying basic features that were included in year-2000 era cell phones or blackberries to be entirely missing.
Like 90% of the business market I’m using the phone connected to MSFT exchange. Verizon market the phone as supporting Exchange, and given the keyboard my hope was that the device would stack up well against a Blackberry. What I’ve found after a week of use and talking with Verizon tech support is that functionality as an exchange client seems to be still surprisingly primitive.
What’s missing in the email client ?
* You can receive a calendar invitation – but the device treats it as a dumb e-mail – there is no way to accept it into your calendar or do anything useful with it.
* You cannot move messages from the inbox into folders.
* There is no search capability at all for email or calendar items. Not great when you have 1000 emails in your inbox.
* You cannot dial a phone number from an email – so if you send me an email with your phone number, I have to remember or write down your number and manually punch it in to the phone app.
* There appears to be no cut and paste in email - you can do this in the web browser, but I couldn't figure out any way to cut/paste in the email client.
* Email attachments do not download / cannot be viewed – the phone knows the attachement is there and tries to download it, but hangs in the process and is not able to view any attachment in the Exchange email client (tried .jpg, .wav, .txt)
* Lower priority things - you can't set / change your out of office message, you can't set up an email signature.
I also keep running into other little incomplete features that basic cell phones have.
A big miss is that the phone does not appear support voice dialing over bluetooth – so it appears to be illegal or at least unwise to use in your car in most states – since you can’t start a call from a Bluetooth headset or speakerphone – you have to initiate a phone call from the device by fumbling around with the contacts or phone apps.
Another would be what seems to be the lack of speed dialing from the phone application.
I've spoken with several nice reps at Verizon support and learned a few things.
One - they have had a total of four hours of training on the Droid and the other new smart phones. Two I talked with had not actually touched a droid yet.
Two - they are getting lots of calls like mine about people who are excited about the device overall, but frustrated with the lack of basic features when compared with a 10 year old blackberry or cell phone.
Three - they don't seem to know how to handle this kind of basic product functionality gap feedback. It's not clear they have a process for sending it to google or even to internal product management. They can try to debug problems, but seem equally surprised that the phone can't do basic things like the above.
Am I missing something here?
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Turns out I was not missing anything.
The Google Android forums are documenting all of this stuff. Looks like all of a sudden with the Droid launch there are many many more business types all running into the same set of issues at the same time.
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I agree for the most part that the OS and application base is missing alot of key features. However, I can almost bet the Droid will receive another Google OS upgrade before summer 2010. Its only speculation, but I do know Android 2.x will ship within 6 months as Google's track record shows (1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 within 1 year)
Some things are being addressed in the MR coming soon. Read though the list of items, I know the bluetooth issue is one fix coming Dec 11th.
http://phandroid.com/2009/11/09/motorola-droid-and-htc-droid-eris-ota-updates-coming-december-11th
Is Android ready for the big corporate world... no.
Is it ready for business analysis and prototyping... YES!
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Thanks - I has also seen that document - but I didn't see where it says that bluetooth hands-free dialing will be supported... I think this is the biggest, most basic gap in the phone which is also a safety and legal issue. There is a very active discussion on the Google Android forum on this topic...
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kenyu73 wrote:I agree for the most part that the OS and application base is missing alot of key features. However, I can almost bet the Droid will receive another Google OS upgrade before summer 2010. Its only speculation, but I do know Android 2.x will ship within 6 months as Google's track record shows (1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 within 1 year)
Some things are being addressed in the MR coming soon. Read though the list of items, I know the bluetooth issue is one fix coming Dec 11th.
http://phandroid.com/2009/11/09/motorola-droid-and-htc-droid-eris-ota-updates-coming-december-11th
Is Android ready for the big corporate world... no.
Is it ready for business analysis and prototyping... YES!
I think it can be ready for the big corporate world, especially if people start to use Google Documents. Sharing/GDocs Application galore much?
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I am also quite surprised at these sorts of omissions (amazed really).
I was hoping this thread might have addressed the problem I have (the biggest one, that is), which is that after I set up my corp Exchange, it synced and still syncs the email and contacts perfectly, but refuses to sync the calendar at all, saying Authentication Failed every time I try to sync it. Any ideas; faced this problem?
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My calendar sync with Exchange 2007 works ok -- but it did't start working until after I opened the calendar application for the first time...
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I'm also a former BlackBerry user for the last 5 years. I'm having very good luck with Touchdown by Nitrodesk as my Exchange client. It is full featured except for Notes. The interface is very good - much better than the built-in client. You can also accept meeting requests from the email meeting request itself (which currently doesn't work on the droid - you have to find the event in your calendar and accept it there).
I'm using it with my companies corporate Exchange server. I first tried the full featured 5 day free trial version to make sure it worked well and tonight I bought it for $9.99. I have turned off the Droid's built-in Exchange sync and am only using Touchdown now. Just my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
