Gadgetory

hey guys John Redinger here when Google first unleashed Android Mayton let out one of the first mass adopted open-source and mobile platforms the world had really ever seen it was very highly customisable it had a great user interface but alas the polish and refinement I feel of some of its competition because they have had generations upon generations to refine the user experience so what we have now with the Motorola Droid is Android 2.0 that really catches Android up in terms of user look and feel and polish and also brings with it some very welcome features and upgrades that I think almost separate Android from the rest of the pack let's go ahead and get started and what you're getting see now is an overview of Android 2.0 demonstrated here on the Motorola Droid so you can see what to expect when your current device gets the upgrade to 2.0 or whether you pick up a Motorola Droid yourself so the first thing you're going to take a look at is what you're going to see all the time the unlock screen so if you've used a stock with Google Android device in the past you're not the unlock screen was pretty simple you hit the menu button and you unlocked it nothing really fancy or anything to see their devices like the iPhone or the Palm Pre had seen fancy slides from lock functionality that the Droid and Android particular didn't have but now we do and we also have some added functionality as well so to unlock you slide that to unlock however there's some more functionality built into that as well if you want to change the phone from vibrates ring or vice versa and slide it the other direction now sound is turned on I do it one more time sound is now turned off kind of nice nice and simple to use so slide that the other direction and there we've got the familiar home screen that you've seen on previous Android devices now I should mention is a difference between Android devices there are devices that are technically with Google you can see right down there and that means devices that have the stock Android operating system and then there are those like HTC Hero that aren't with Google they could put their own on top of it this is an overview of just the stock Android interface so the icons look a little bit smoother the menus are behaving a little bit faster and it may be due just to the hardware on the droid I'm going to assume that there was a lot of optimization that went into this upgrade the previous version that was the newest version of Android was 1.6 and of course this is 1.2 so let me share are 2.0 rather so let me show you some of the cool things that come with 2.0 one of the things I always liked about Android was the ability to add widgets to your home screen so if you don't know what widgets are think of it like dashboard for your Mac or gadgets for your PC a little sort of mini programs that have limited functionality but can help the user do little things that they become accustomed to so let me show you what's new here it go ahead and tap the home screen I get a new widgets bar and here I got some things that are quite new so you're seeing one right there called corporate calendar and that's because the with Google phones now support full exchange connectivity so for email calendar contacts everything you now have full exchange connectivity and that's important for business users this makes an Android device really have broader appeal people that were relied on Exchange had a very difficult time adopting the platform and with that exchange connectivity in Android 2.0 you're also going to get you to find mailbox where all your mail messages from different accounts will go into as something we've seen on a Palm Pre but previously had not seen on Android device so back to the widgets you now got a new Facebook widget with a new Facebook application found in the Android Marketplace if I was signed in here I'd seen my newsfeed what my friends are up to and I could post messages right from this widget very big Facebook user it's very cool thing to see so some of the other widgets that are new that are extremely useful one called power control and this one lets you control obviously the wireless functionality of your device see where your power is at you need to turn off different radios and probably one of the last new and I think most useful widgets is YouTube YouTube is obviously owned by Google so have some increased YouTube functionality clearly makes sense so let me show you what this widget looks like you now have one touch access to youtube video search or YouTube video upload which in the droids case is very cool it's got a five megapixel camera that you can now record video with and upload right to YouTube just by hitting that little camera button you sign into your account you hit upload and boom your videos will show up you can do that all over 3G which is quite neat and speaking of over 3G the Amazon mp3 store which is previously Wi-Fi only can now be accessed over 3G so losing that download music via Amazon it's going to be a very welcome change for you so speaking of camera if we talked about just a minute ago let me show you some the new camera functionality found in android 2.0 so again this is gonna take advantage of the five megapixel sensor found on the droid so you can see that there's a functionality there but if you go to the menu and settings you don't have some advanced settings to previously not found on Android devices things like focus mode picture quality picture size so our location was there before color effect white balance scene mode and flash this one has an LED flash so you've got a lot more ways to tweak your pictures and a way to make the device more your own and that's really what 2.0 is about bringing new features in to help make the device more customizable for you and speaking of customizable for you also an Android 2.0 and the accessibility options you're gonna get the ability to do some voiceover tech so if you're hard of hearing it's gonna be something that's going to be quite nice to you the phone is actually will speak the menu options to you let's go back to the home screen and let's take a look at the Android Marketplace the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6 brought some nice updates to the Android Marketplace that continues with 2.0 let me show you what you're gonna get when you log into the marketplace click go and click one of the applications and what I like most about this is most of them are free so open up WP to go I get some information about it I get screenshots some comments and ratings and I get more applications about the developer or from the developer I can view the developers web page or even send an email to the developer and some applications even give you the phone number to contact the developer which is quite interesting how you can flag it as inappropriate if you like so but probably the biggest welcome addition to 2.0 is this new navigation feature and it's just in beta and it's found only right now on a Motorola Droid it does turn-by-turn navigation similar to what we find on Tom Tom or Garmin devices however it is completely free now I'm going to do a separate video showing intricacies of how this works and walk you through it step-by-step I want to show you very quickly what that looks like so we'll go ahead and hit car home and you get sort of a new bar looking interface where you can use voice search so I could type it in and say drive to South Coast Plaza which is a mall by me it automatically finds South Coast Plaza via search and would route me there and give me turn-by-turn directions with voice over text and again there'll be a full video on this but I wanted to show you what the interface looked like so speaking of voice over text that is a big thing with 2.0 is voice search so let me show you how that works so obviously you can search normally you can type it in if you like or if you hit that little microphone up there it opens up a voice search TechnoBuffalo I'm actually surprised with how quickly that it works so let me go back one more time in techno buffalo I've been speaking through the first time and there you go finds techno Buffalo's homepage and all kinds of information about TechnoBuffalo I'm actually really impressed with how well this works if you don't always have time to type in what you're looking for or not that accurate typing and you want to do a search you can use the voice search for really almost anything through the phone and it works quite well also an Android 2.0 is some improvements to the web browser like you're seeing me use right now again I'll be doing a separate video on the web browser preparing its other devices but suffice to say it's a very improved experience you still don't have multi-touch support for pinch and zoom but you're getting a very capable very quick browser and I'm really impressed with what the Google has done with the browser that's found on the Droid and found on Android 2.0 so guys when the interest of brevity before this becomes a 20 minute video I just wanted to talk to you about what you got with Android 2.0 and what you would expect if you upgraded the 2.0 and what some of the differences are with door to the outgoing 1.6 devices so hope you enjoy for exclusive content checking out of Twitter twitter.com slash John for Lakers and to learn more about TechnoBuffalo which is launching tomorrow November 2nd check out TechnoBuffalo come see you guys in next video bye bye