I’ve had my Motorola Droid 3 for three days now and I’m finally getting the chance to use it and set it up! Here are some of my first impressions of the phone.

Photo of my new Droid 3 taken with my Original Droid

Here’s why I picked the Droid 3

• I really liked the Original Droid I’ve had for the past 2 years and wanted the latest in the Motorola Droid line
• I wanted a phone with top-of-the-line hardware specs (speed, memory, screen) and a front-facing camera, and the Droid 3 had it all
• It’s slightly bigger than the Droid, but not too big
• Even though I primarily use Swype (which it comes with), I like having a hardware keyboard available when needed

Pros so far:

It’s much faster than my Droid 1, and the touch-screen is nice and responsive

It has a crisp high-quality screen with good brightness

It has Gingerbread (Android 2.3.4)

The camera is impressive, and the front-facing camera is a great bonus

It’s really a great ‘model’ Android phone – has everything you need

Cons so far:

I really don’t like the hard plastic case Verizon is offering with it. Mine is a cool dark purple color and looks fine, but it’s slippery (I always feel like I’m about to drop the phone), and it has a sharp area at the bottom where I put my pinky to balance the phone. The ridge around the screen also makes it difficult to touch the hardware buttons without touching the screen also. The Droid 3 is definitely the largest I’d go with a phone since it’s a bit bulky for my small hands, so I think I’ll skip the hard case and go with an invisible shield, then get a soft case to keep it in. (Edit: I held a friend’s phone with the same case in blue, and his didn’t have the sharp edge! So, it could be particular to the purple color, or to my specific case.)

Sharp edge on the Droid 3 hard case

There’s no dedicated camera button (I’m used to easily being able to start the camera and take a photo with one hand on the Droid).

It does have a bit of bloatware. Some of the apps it comes with can be uninstalled, but many can’t. I don’t root my phones, so I don’t have a problem with the locked bootloader, but I do wish I could uninstall apps like GoToMeeting which I don’t use.

I’m not finding the menus to be intuitive. For instance, I wanted to share a photo I took via Twidroyd. On my Droid, I could simply open the menu when viewing the photo after taking it, choose Share, then Twidroyd, and use the app. In Gingerbread’s Camera/Gallery app, the menu button brings up a menu with Edit & Delete options, Add to Album, and the choice to use the photo as your wallpaper or profile pic. There’s also a “More” menu, but I didn’t see a “Share” button. I exited the menu and accidentally touched the screen. That’s when another menu with Share and Upload buttons appeared. I don’t like how there are 2 menus you get to 2 different ways when looking a photo, that’s not intuitive. I don’t think it should have been tricky for an advanced Android use to figure out how to share a picture!

It seems like the operating system is designed to take as much advantage of ‘The Cloud’ as possible. This is a pro, but the con is that I feel like every app is prompting me to synchronize my data somewhere and connect to every Social Media site. The phone comes with some kind of ‘Media Server’ called DLNA which I haven’t taken the time to figure out yet. I’m sure it’s useful, but the fact that if I weren’t careful, my data would be synced to a bunch of different servers from the moment I set up my phone is a bit disconcerting. I like using the Cloud, but I do want to know where my data is going and why. I’m not sure if it’s the apps Verizon put on the phone or Gingerbread or what, but it doesn’t feel like the data sharing is as transparent as I’d like it to be

Summary:

It may seem like I’m listing more cons than pros, but I just wanted to explain some things I noticed that make the Droid 3 different from the Droid which concerned me. I think my gripes are more with the operating system than with the phone. Overall, I think this is a great phone and I’ll be very happy with it once I get it all set up.

I would definitely recommend the Droid 3 to anyone that wants the benefits of the Motorola Droid line as well as the latest hardware features. Just be ready to spend some time customizing the setup so you have control of what it’s doing with your information, and getting used to Gingerbread if you don’t have a device with it already!

Do you have a new phone? What are your impressions of it so far?

In this 2nd follow-up to our Android Phones for Women survey, let’s dive into what you thought about a “feminine” Android device, and how you thought an Android phone designed for us ladies should look:

• 71% of you are not offended by the idea of phones designed to appeal specifically to males or females
• 60% of you said that on a scale of 1 to 10, your likelihood of purchasing a phone marketed especially to women (assuming it had all of the features you wanted) was a 7 or higher. 20% of you selected a 10, meaning you would seek out a phone designed for women.
• 51% of you said you are offended when manufacturers market phones specifically for women that have stereotypical non-functional features like a pink body
• 44.5% of you said that color options would appeal to you, and 35.5% said phone bodies or skins with patterns and designs would appeal to you
• 70% of you said you thought that color options would appeal to most women, and 45% of you said you thought phone bodies or skins with patterns and designs would appeal to most women
• Only 16% of you said that phones with a smaller body would appeal to you, though 35% of you thought a smaller phone body would appeal to most women

Percentages calculated out of 154 survey respondents.

Before I go further, let me point out that in other parts of the survey, it was very clear that top hardware specs were more important to females than the way the phone looks, but for this post, we’re just looking at this aspect of an Android phone designed for women. (I chose to look at this aspect of the survey first because of the ad discussed below.)

So from these stats, it appears women are receptive to phones designed with more feminine aspects, and if we were designing the “perfect” phone for women, it looks like multiple color and pattern options would be a good thing to offer — as long as those options aren’t just stereotypical colors like pink. Surprisingly to me, a large majority of respondents would not be interested in a phone with a smaller body.

Here are some excerpts from survey comments on the look & feel of a phone for women:

• “Women like bright colors!” – Julie Lett
• “As much as I like pink, I don’t want a pink, girly phone!” – Anonymous
• “The size of the droid phones is an indicator that the phones are clearly for men. The bulkier and heavier the phones are, the worse they fit in a pocket of tight girl jeans… My hands are small and delicate, I don’t want to have to wrestle with a huge brick just to answer the phone or text someone.” – Anonymous
• “I personally would want a phone aimed at women that had the specifications of all the higher end Android phones, but with a feminine touch by way of colors and skins to make it a little more girlie.” – Anonymous
• “I do not like black phones – they are hard to find in a purse.” – Lucy F
• “Too much glitz or pink can be a turnoff, especially if you’re marketing to women over the age of 16.” – Anonymous
• “Something not too big like a 4 inch screen.” – Anonymous

There is a rumor that this is an ad for a phone code-named the HTC Glamor, which people think will be marketed to women because of the color choices and the “clothes in a closet” design. All we know about it so far is how it looks in this ad, and it’s alleged code-name.

What do you think? Tell us in the comments!

Those of us that are wary about malware and viruses in software always say, “Read the permissions!”, meaning that you should really understand what you are giving the app permission to do when you install it. Google makes you click through an app’s security permission list when installing for a reason – so it’s not their fault if you allow an app to steal your information!

However, even though I’m a programmer myself, I still find myself installing apps with security permissions that I don’t fully understand! It’s not easy to know what all of the various mysterious-sounding permission names mean, so I decided it might be a good idea to dive in and find out what a few of these permissions really allow the app publishers to do and share that info here.

The first one I want to research is one of the most common: Phone Calls – Read Phone State & Identity. Why would a ringtone app need to know my phone’s unique identifier? Why would a wallpaper app need to know whether I’m in a call or not? What do phone state and identity really mean anyway?

The first place I looked for information was the Android SDK documentation – which is the reference material developers use when building their apps. The list of permissions was interesting, but not particularly enlightening. It said that “READ_PHONE_STATE” allows your app to access the state of the phone. OK, so what does that mean? Digging deeper, I found the various values for “phone state” listed here, which include “Call State – Ringing” and “Data Connected”. So, basically the app can tell whether you’re in a call or not and what the state of your data connection is.

But the more concerning part of the permission is the “identity” part. Allowing an app to track a phone’s unique identifier allows them to track your usage of the app, and allow a developer to know whether one person has downloaded several of their apps. Basically, it’s like letting Google track your search history: it may not know who you are exactly, but tracking your usage over time allows a company to build a profile of your individual activity.

It turns out that the main reasons developers give for needing this permission are:

1. they need a way to assign a unique ID to you for registration/activation purposes, or
2. they are using an advertising system like AdMob that requires them to use this permission so the 3rd-party advertiser can collect statistics.

Since most free app developers rely on advertising to fund their businesses, you can see why so many apps need this permission, but you also have to understand the trade-off: both the advertiser and the app publisher can track your usage of the app, and your usage across multiple apps if they collect all that data centrally (which advertisers definitely do).

This one is pretty tough to avoid, so I’d say just be especially wary of typically-suspicious apps (like ringtone apps) that use this permission and only install apps with this permission from developers you trust.

I rely a lot on the app’s marketplace rating to determine safety. Although it’s not a definite indicator (a developer could create a really great app and still use your information maliciously, or a developer with good intentions could just publish a really poor app), if I see an app with a really poor rating, especially if a developer has multiple apps with really poor ratings, I am suspicious that they may be spending too little time on improving their application because their reason for wanting you to download their app has nothing to do with its quality, they just want your information or ad impressions.

So, overall, keep your eyes open and uninstall apps that make you suspicious, but keep in mind that sometimes dangerous-sounding permissions are necessary for non-malicious purposes.

I do have a suggestion for Google, though – allow us to opt-out of individual permissions! If we download an app and find that it can run just fine without reading our “identity”, then we should be able to disable that “feature” of each app on an individual basis.

On a related note, I just heard about an app today called “Privacy Blocker” that claims to do just that, and I hope to review it here in the future!

What other permissions do you want us to explore here on WomenWithDroids? Let us know in the comments!

This post is a kind of reverse “Ask the Droid Women” article – this time, we have some questions for you to answer!

I originally thought my friend was a bit crazy for getting the Droid X – with no hardware keyboard and a huge screen, it didn’t fit my requirements for great phone… until I used it.

Once you view content on that big screen, all other phone screens just seem too small for watching videos, playing games, or anything else that benefits from the larger interface. I initially thought it looked silly to hold a phone that large up to my ear, but I thought about it and realized you see people looking at their Android phone’s screen a lot more often than you see them talking on it. Phones have become so much more than phones in the last couple years, and therefore, bigger just may be better for Android devices.

So, even though I didn’t think it was likely that I would ever get a phone that large, I accepted the Droid X as another great Android phone and could see why people liked it and other big phones like the Evo. I also realized I could never go to a smaller screen like the one on the Droid Pro.

What I didn’t expect was that large-screened phones would become the next big thing. Have you seen the news coming out at CES? Almost all of the major hardware announcements have either been tablets or big-screened phones. Check these out:

HTC Thunderbolt [Droid-Life]	Droid Bionic [Wired Gadget Lab]
LG Revolution [Android Central]	HTC Evo Shift [Wired Gadget Lab]

Of course, these larger screens will also be better for video content, which is more important now that it’s been announced that Hulu Plus [Androinica] and Netflix [Android Central], as well as TV content via some satellite and cable providers will soon be available on Android phones. (Not to mention video calling.)

So here are my questions for you:

Since females generally have smaller hands than males, do you think most women will readily accept and use larger phones, or are they mainly targeted at men?

Would you get both a big-screened phone and a tablet, or go for a smaller-screened phone and use the tablet device for web browsing, multimedia, and games?

If you have a big phone, do you hold it up to your ear to talk, or use a hands-free device?

I’m really curious what other people, especially women, think of this large-screen trend. Tell us in the comments!

We recently announced our new “Ask the Droid Women” feature and a couple of you asked questions, and here is our first set of answers!

Amy asked:

What are your favorite ways to use your Android to spend time with your kids? (And do you have a hard time sharing your Android with them?)

DroidWomen Answer:

Unfortunately, Amy, none of our current regular writers have children, so we’re going to pose this question to the readers here and on Twitter. Readers: If you have kids and can answer Amy’s question – please post your response in the comments below!

Sue asked:

Which is the best smartphone for me? “Me” = a professional, 30 something female who, while quite intelligent overall, is a non-techie/late adopter. I have tried to like iphones and I just don’t. I have not gotten used to touch screens either. I have a Blackberry for work, but actually hate it for anything beyond email. I want essentially a pocket PC [and] an all in one media device. I will do calling, heavy texting, heavy web browsing and email, music. GPS/navigation and a good camera would be useful. I am not a game player, nor am I heavy into social networking.

PLEASE HELP! I’m willing to invest in the right phone, just not sure what that is for me. I have heard Android is “not for beginners” so I’m a little freaked out as I have no idea what that means.

(the full text of Sue’s question can be found here)

DroidWomen Answer:

Hi Sue! We tend not to do specific hardware recommendations on Women With Droids because we haven’t each tried out every phone. However, we can give some buying advice based on your question!

Kassy says: The best advice I can give someone is to take the time to go into the store(s) and try different models. The main reason I say to play with the phones is they all have different screen sensitivity levels and shapes, very personal preferences. I was torn between three phones at first, after a lot of research, but the moment I touched them it was clear my Motorola Droid was what I wanted. I probably spent about an hour playing with them to make sure and it gave me confidence in my purchase.

As for useage as a camera, most Android phones come with either 3 or 5 MP cameras, with the HTC EVO being the king of Android camera phones with a whopping 8 MP back camera and 1.3 MP front camera. A flash is important if you want full camera capability. I haven’t had the opportunity to test out all their cameras but you can easily do that with in-store sample phones. Another cool camera feature to look for is a dedicated camera button on the side, available on some models, it makes it even easier to both bring up the camera and take the shot.

Google navigation is free, pre-installed, and mine has outperformed every standalone GPS and smartphone I’ve put it up against. It gets updated regularly, both as an app and the Google maps it uses for data. Make sure to buy a car charger if you plan on using it a lot in a car, it will drain your battery more than most uses.

Android is fine for beginners but also allows advanced users to do more than other operating systems, which is the only reason it has gotten a reputation as being for techies. You don’t need to root it or mess around with it, it’s just that you can if you want to. Every smartphone does have a bit of a learning curve but I’m confident that anyone can be proficient within a week and there are plenty of resources to help, including this site, of course!

It’s impossible to recommend specific models as this is a highly personal decision, what I like best might even be the opposite of what you like best. However, if you keep all of these things in mind while shopping you are sure to find the one that suits you and your lifestyle perfectly.

Liz says: First thought is that if you’re a heavy texter, you will probably want a physical QWERTY keyboard, like the Droid 2 or the Samsung Epic. Sometimes the touchscreens can be a pain in the butt to accustom to, depends on the person, but since you’ve already expressed that they are less than awesome then a physical keyboard would really be helpful.

The only phone I would consider “too bulky” would be the Droid X, possibly the Evo. I think pretty much any Android phone would qualify for “media device/pocket pc.” If you’re planning on storing a lot of music on there, you’ll want to research internal storage capacity, and storage expandability through microSD cards.

As someone who transitioned from Blackberry to Android…they can be completely fine for beginners! As with all devices, there is a learning curve. Take your time, do your homework and you can be really happy with the results.

Renee says: I think Liz and Kassy gave some great basic hardware advice to consider (Yes, try the phones out! Touchscreen preferences are very personal.), so I’ll focus on answering your software concerns.

When it comes to app choices (for texting, email, music, etc.), almost every Android device allows you to install apps through the Android Market, so you’ll get the same options on most phones. To make sure you can get all of the best apps, make sure to ask what operating system the phone runs and whether it will get automatic upgrades when new versions are released by Google. The ‘standard’ Android operating system version out now is 2.2 (a.k.a “Froyo”), and I would stay away from any phone that isn’t already upgraded to at least Android 2.1.

Some carriers also add their own software interfaces to the base Android interface, which is another reason to try out the phones in stores. You may want to first go to a store that has display phones from several carriers to try & compare so you can experience both the hardware (touchscreen, camera) and the software (homescreen, texting interface). Ask what each carrier has added that you can’t remove so you know what “features” you’ll be stuck with. It’s a good idea to tell the salesperson in advance that you don’t really care about games or social networking apps so they don’t try to use those as selling points or for demonstrations.

For keyboards, you should try out both hardware and software (on-screen) keyboards before buying. I know someone who swore they would never buy a phone without a hardware keyboard for texting because he said on-screen keyboard keys were small and frustrating, but he made the switch after trying Swype keyboard in landscape mode (big keys, swipe-style entry) on the Droid X, which has a good responsive touch screen.

I don’t want to add too much more length to this article, so I’ll just also add that once you dive in and get your new phone, check out our Beginner’s Articles here and our app recommendations here!

I hope we helped make you feel more confident about what to look for when shopping for your first Android phone!

Do you have a question for the Droid Women? Ask in the comments below, and we may answer yours in our next issue!

We’re excited to announce a new interactive feature here on WomenWithDroids.Com: “Ask the Droid Women!”

As you probably guessed, you can ask questions in the comments of any “Ask the Droid Women” post (including this one), and we will pick some of your questions to answer. Who are the Droid Women? Find out on our About page here! Each of us will weigh in with our own unique perspectives, then any WomenWithDroids readers out there that want to follow up can add their opinions in the comments.

We’d love for you to ask specific questions, like “How do you use your phone to manage your daily to-do list?” or “What’s a good game to play to relax before bed?” as opposed to really general questions like “What’s your favorite app?”.

So, what do you want to know about how we use our Android devices? Ask the Droid Women by commenting below, then keep your eye out for future posts to see if we answer yours or to weigh in on others’ questions with your opinion!