My most recent companion/acquisition/toy depending on how you might describe it, is a Motorola Droid 3. While it is a companion it that it goes almost everywhere I do, is an acquisition in that I purchased it, it is hardly a toy as there is not a game on it which gets used.
My cell phone use goes back to when there were only two towers in the Capital Saratoga Region. The phone cost about $1,500.00 and was mounted in my car. I remember how excited I was when I learned the third tower was going up.
Over the years I have also had dozens of PDA devices, my first being the HP OmniGo. That was a superb tool. I was able to write on the screen using Graffiti. Graffiti for those who are fairly new to smartphones is a style of writing that translates the written letter into text. The OmniGo also had a Qwerty keyboard. When the device was held in a portrait mode, Graffiti was used and when held in portrait mode, the keyboard was used.
The Palm Pilot was the next generation of devices which I added to my tool belt. The Palm Pilots were great, but carrying a cell phone and PDA all the time became cumbersome and annoying.
Then Kyocera came out with a device which combined a cell phone and the Palm Pilot. These worked well, but compared to today’s devices left a big bulge in a pocket or looked like a small side arm when in a holster.
Next came various BlackBerrys. They had a lot of functionality and provided a great amount of control for power users. While BlackBerrys are still around, in my opinion unless RIM (the makers of BlackBerry) comes out with something spectacular, they are a dying breed.
Along the way I have had several versions of Windows based phones, and a while back switched to the Android platform. My latest smartphone before the Droid 3 was the Samsung Fascinate. This device had a lot of very good features and allowed me to take a week long vacation without having to carry along my notebook. With the proper apps installed I was able to do everything I needed while away.
Back to the Droid 3. What I missed was a physical keyboard. Swype works well, but for a lot of the work I do, using a touch screen increases the amount of time it takes to get certain tasks completed. For me the Droid 3 is the best of both worlds as I can use the touch screen and physical keyboard.
Another nice feature of the Droid 3 is the car docking station. When the Droid 3 is in the car dock it charges the device and automatically goes into a different mode, making it easier to operate while on the road. The buttons become larger and the choices less. The system also reads incoming texts letting me know who they are from and asks what I would like to do with them. Overall the Droid 3 makes for a very good business tool, which for me is primarily what I use smartphones for.
