Its a dual-core phone with a GB of memory. It’s on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Of course it is fast. The big draw for me, however, was always the intrigue of being able to plug the phone into a laptop dock that was supposed to make it function as a laptop. Surprisingly, I got more than I bargained for. Not only does the Lapdock mirror the phone (in a window!), but it contains a fully functioning FireFox browser. Yes, I can install extensions. Wow.

Essentially, this is a mobile Firefox browser on an 11.6″ screen with full keyboard weighing 2.4 pounds. It’s attached to my phone and I’m grandfathered into VZW’s unlimited data at their 4G LTE speeds, so I’m always connected. It has its own battery that lasts all day and can even charge my phone’s battery, too. Everything now-a-days is web-based anyway, so where’s the downside here?

Is it perfect? No. Keyboard and mouse movement is a bit slow. I actually type too fast for the browser to keep up with me. I’m sure I am an exception, however. Also, the phone runs low on memory quickly when loading sites that rely heavily on JavaScript. One such example, ironically enough, is Gmail. Google Analytics, however, seems to run fine for me.

However, the biggest take-away here is I’m using Firefox, with plugins familiar to me from my desktop, without the need to carry around a full-size (and weight) computer. I was able to sit through three full-length meetings, still text as heavily as I do all day long. I haven’t made any calls today, but I’ve used this phone on the dock for over 4 hours total today and still have 70% battery power at 5:30 PM. Impressive. The dock still has 40% battery power, too.

The Motorola Atrix lapdock failed to sell well. I dare say that AT&T had to shoulder some of that blame. However, analysts claim the Bionic Lapdock won’t sell either. I will agree, the price tag is hefty. There is a $100 rebate, if you buy the Bionic, lapdock and a certain Verizon Wireless data plan all together. But that still means you’re shelling out $300 for a phone and $200 for the dock.

For my money, the lapdock accessory has truly made the Bionic a production device as much as a consumption device. A tablet (iPad, Android or otherwise) is still a limited device and most Web sites serve mobile pages to them. The lapdock gives me a full-blown Firefox browser. That means I now have full-version Google Docs, Gmail, Evernote and a variety of other Web-based services and sties available to me. Of course, I have the mobile app versions on my phone. In a pinch, that option still works. I’m used to carrying a 15″ laptop that weights 5.6 pounds along with my phone. I typically use it for Web-based applications and nothing more. The lapdock is smaller and gives me that same ability. Really, why not?

I’ll entertain questions in the comments.

If you’re not familiar with Android’s speech recognition, you speak to your phone and the waveform created gets transmitted to Google, analyzed and sent back to your device. This means for those who opt in to this service, your voice and your speech patterns will be sent to Google. How’s that for privacy issues?

Google promises they will protect your privacy. With as many PHd-types Google has, you would like to think they can learn a lesson or two from their previous privacy failures. Being overly cautious at this point, I read through their very concise and easy-to-read privacy policy.  Google wants to store the information in your Google account and encrypt the data using keys. As a techie, I presume this means public and private keys as is typical of standards-level encryption.  Google has this to say about they keys and the ability to access the data:

How do we protect the data?

The ‘electronic keys’ are designed to be accessed by machines. Very few people within Google, who passed careful vetting, will have access to them. The personalized acoustic and language models are binary files designed for use by machines.

So the data is encrypted both ways and at rest. It can only be accessed from a physical device, not by individuals searching around the data center. And they’ve put the human factors back into it, with special vetting procedures for those “very few” who will have access to these special machines.

If you change your mind about participating, Google says you can go into your account, turn it off and they will immediately destroy the keys, thereby destroying any way to access the data. They will also destroy the link between your device and the files and the data files, themselves.

Thoughts? Comments?  Will you sign up for this?

While there’s debate on whether T-Mobile’s 4G network is “officially”  4G or not, they’re certainly trying to both position themselves better than AT&T’s 3G service (not hard to do), while at the same time showing consumers that the iPhone isn’t the only device in the world to do what Apple claims are differentiators.

Here’s the video:

Ahh, irony is never dead in ad executive offices is it? Cleaver ad. If it worked to boost Apple’s sales, what does T-Mobile have to lose?  Certainly not much. The larger question now becomes, will they follow it up? Will Google help pay for commercials and start feature sets, dragging the AT&T network (figuratively and literally) behind them? I, for one, look forward to some nice sparring here.

The ability to dictate to any text field is impressive. I have used this in the car with the sunroof open and lots of white noise and it rarely misses. However, when it does miss the result is quite amusing.

Pinching is nice, but I had the map upgrade before the 2.1 upgrade and the addition to the browser is not much different, either.

Active wallpaper is nice and according to the phone barely using CPU cycles or power, respective to other apps and radio signals.

So why has it dramatically slowed down? Sometimes it seems very unresponsive. On the other hand, I haven’t had to reboot it. It slows, but is never completely unresponsive.  Many have already blogged about frame rate dropping after upgrading and there’s arguments whether that is OpenGL or the OS.  However, I’ve noticed more memory usage and much more battery usage.

All in all, the Motorola Droid is far superior to any phone I’ve ever owned and still does everything I expected it to.  The Android platform seems more phone to use than iPhone (we’ll see about OS 4, though).  I guess I was expecting more from an “upgrade.”