"Drrrrrroooooid!"

(UPDATE: I originally wrote this for new Motorola Droid owners, but since I’ve answered many of these questions for other Android devices, I’ve changed it to be more far-reaching.)

For whatever reason, you bought the Motorola Droid a new Android phone; and you’re sitting there with no experience with the platform at all, no Earthly clue what can be done with your new phone, and a new two year contract saying you’ll hang onto it. You’ve heard people say how powerful it is, and how it’s comparable to the iPhone and blah blah blah. Let me just invite you to clear your mind of any preconceived notions, and fill it with these important things about Android that no one seems to talk about:

The Long Press is your most useful command

It seems like the most overlooked fact about Android: you can’t live without the long press.  And if you’re new to the touchable OS, it’s not really an intuitive command.  I mean, flip open an old RAZR,  hold down a key and see what happens.  But press and hold your finger on nearly anything in Android, and you get super important and useful results. Try it on the home screen and you get the “add to home screen” menu, which lets you put new app shortcuts, widgets, live folders, or change the wallpaper. If you want to get rid of the icons on your homescreen when you get your new device, just long press them and drag them to the trash can that appears on the bottom of your screen. Long press an email and you can open, delete, forward, reply/all, or mark as read; Long press a link in the browser, and you can open it in a new window, bookmark it, save it, share it or copy the URL. It is the single most useful command you have.

Long.
press.
everything.

The first place you must go is the “settings” menu

Find the menu button and push it, and then push “settings.” On the first Android phones, this was one of the most important things to do, so you could optimize performance and stretch out your battery life. It’s not quite as necessary to tweak the Droid in this way, because right out of the box you’ll find it is able to sustain a great deal of use without much lag and without battery slaughter. However, you absolutely must must must (impossible to overstress) familiarize yourself with the tweakability of Android 2.0 so if something bothers you, it can be changed.

I read an awful article today on Silicon Alley Insider about “The 10 Things we Love and Hate about the Droid, ” and most of their complaints could have been negated with conscientious use of the settings menu. You can turn haptic feedback off, you can adjust media and ringer volumes, you can turn off screen re-orientation, you can turn off screen auto-dimmer, and such. Most of their other complaints stemmed from the Droid’s differences from the iPhone. They concluded that it’s “not better than the iPhone.” Which is just retarded. It’s different, and you love your iPhone. Nobody fucking decides an interface or ecosystem is better right after switching to it.

After a few days of using your new Android phone, I highly suggest going to the settings menu, and then hitting “about phone,” and then “battery use.” It’s both eye-opening and hilarious. Chances are good that more than half of your battery power is consumed by the screen being on and a tiny fraction by the Android Operating System and apps. It makes for a strong argument in favor of electrophoretic displays (e-book/kindle screens.)

You don’t need iTunes, no, wait… FUCK iTUNES!

Harsh, yes…but anyone who tells you that Android is somehow inferior to iPhone OS because it “lacks sync” has obviously spent too much time with their iPods and iPhones. It amazes me that people actually believe the need to sync their devices is A POSITIVE THING?!?! If you have to take time to hook your computer up to your phone so all the files stay fresh and up-to-date, guess what…they are fundamentally out of sync. They are working in their own little worlds and must be strung together after the fact. That is an old way of doing things, and anyone who has owned a Palm Pilot or similar PDA will tell you, it is goddamn annoying and should be abolished.

Repeat after me:

Sync is not a positive feature.
The need for sync means incongruity is programmed into the device.

So if you’ve come to Android expecting an iPod, where your desktop and your handheld are in constant communion, you will be disappointed. Though there are ways to hook up the Droid with iTunes, I hope you will look at Android as a mobile portal to the Web and Web-based services, and not an extension of your lousy desktop and your pirated mp3s. Get used to this. Without network connectivity, most of your devices are probably pretty worthless, right? Your laptop can bear some heavy computational loads, and your workstation can do the serious powerlifting, but we don’t live in the supercomputer era of homebase power computing any more. Even the burliest teraflop setup would be considered crippled if it wasn’t connected to a larger-scale network. And our wimpy sub-1GHz mobile phone processors have helped this become a reality.

Besides, if you’re looking for music, Pandora (and to a lesser extent Slacker Radio) are the great equalizers. They’re free, “cloud-based,” and on Verizon, stream like magic. The network is, again, the power.

With all that being said, I’ll give you your next point.

Hook up with any email service (how-to)

My inbox receives my work email, gmail, aim/aol mail, yahoo mail, and windows live hotmail and so can yours. Here’s how you do it, in order of increasing difficulty.

Gmail: This is part of the device setup, and Gmail gets its own app. You’re walked through it, so this doesn’t even factor in, really.
Windows Live Hotmail: This is delightfully easy. Go to the email app, push the menu button, push “add account,” then type in your Live/Hotmail address and password, and you’re done.
Yahoo Mail: This is a bit more tricky. When you get to the “add account” part, you have to enter your Yahoo email name and password, but then hit “manual setup.” From here, (Incoming Server Settings) make the IMAP server “imap.mail.yahoo.com” and the Port is 143. In Outgoing Server Settings, set the SMTP Server to “smtp.mobile.mail.yahoo.com” and the Port to 587. Then, check “Require sign-in” and press Next.
AIM Mail This is almost identical to Yahoo, but just change the IMAP and SMTP server names to “imap.aim.com,” and “smtp.aim.com.” The ports are the same.
Others I highly encourage you to poke around, and try setting up connections to any Webmail accounts you have. And because the Droid is Exchange compatible, you can set up your work-related email accounts and calendars just as easily as you set up a Windows Live account. Just enter your username and password and it’s good to go.

Next: Apps in the “Verizon” directory in the Android Market and what’s so special about them.