From the land of Droids...

OK, I've had my Motorola Droid since last Friday, so I've had a bit of time to play with it and add apps and see what it will do, at least for me. I'm not into music, so I haven't tried anything in that realm except to set up a Pandora radio station, which works fine. I was more interested in finding out how closely I could tie it into the rest of my home office compute environment - what things that I can do or share between my desktop (now mostly used as a file and print server) and my laptop over my WIFI net.

Let me preface the remainder of this post by admitting that I'm little more than a power user of PC's. I'm not a techie, although I'd admit to be a wanta-be sometimes. I've been around PCs since they were invented and worked for Digital Equipment Corp in sales when they were invented (that may give you a clue that I'm also and old dude). I'm not afraid to install hardware or software into PC's but I haven't a clue how to write software. I do create and maintain several Web sites, but that is just knowing how to use a good Website development tool. I'm basically a user, who knows just enough to get into deep doo-doo every now and then, but who isn't afraid to try things.

The good news for me is that I can share almost everything that I need to access. I have installed the Estongs File Manager and the DocsToGo Apps and set up my WIFI network to allow access to my laptop and desktop files. This all works great. I can "see" my word and excel and PowerPoint and pdf files from the phone and can copy them and paste them into the phones file space. Once they are there, I can open and manipulate them as needed with DocsToGo and then send them as attachments via email. I have all of my email accounts routed through one account that also forwards to the phone, which means that I can do useful email work while on the road. As a Realtor, I can also get to my local MLS database and "see" any listed property and even schedule a showing on-line with some of them. This is all good stuff to me.

My next challenge will be figuring out how to print a file from the phone, either over Bluetooth or over the WIFI net. I have yet to find any printer drivers to install or haven't really even figured out what I need to do that. I'm relatively certain that my company is not going to allow us to attached to the office WIFI Network from these phones and I guess I can't blame them, since there are security issues and potential virus issues that the corporate IT types need to worry about.

There were certainly lots of moments of frustration in the first couple of days as I figured out how to navigate to the functions that I was trying to use or how to order and install stuff or other "learning curve" issues; however, overall I must say that I'm quite impressed with what one can do with this little wonder Droid. There are already lots of things that I hope there will be apps written to accomplish with this tool. The possibilities with this much power in the palm of your hand are enormous.