In a very scary development that is bound to waste even more of my day...I figured out how to post to the blog via SMS.

App review: Quick Profiles

If you're like me, you are frustrated with the default options for changing your volume etc on this phone. I mean, you have so many things that this phone does...and that's great. But no one wants all those great things disturbing their sleep in the middle of the night and making you have a case of the Mondays.



Yet at the same time you might want to be able to get that ever-important phone call at 3am reminding you to fill out your TPS reports. So in that case, where does it leave you? You can go the hard route and disable every notification every night and re-enable them in the morning, or you can download Quick Profiles from the market, for free.

Quick Profiles allows you to set up and manage different profiles of all types. For example, my two most commonly used profiles are "vibrate" and "night". While that seems like a combination of words most women would use in a single sentence, they are in fact just two sound profiles for my phone. Without them I wouldn't even have kept my phone. Essentially I have two main ways I like to keep my phone: vibrate during the day for everything and at night everything but the ringer silenced. This app works great with Handcent or ChompSMS messaging app (see below) as they both have a notification option of "Vibrate only when ringer is set to vibrate".

So you take a few minutes to edit some profiles, place a link on your desktop, then it literally takes two clicks to change profiles...one to open the app and one to choose a profile. Then the app auto-closes so you don't have to mess with it after.

Here are some screenshots...go download this app right away!

App review: ChompSMS

I have bounced around left and right between the stock messaging application, Handcent, and ChompSMS. Ultimately my personal preference, despite all the fun features of third party messaging apps, is minimilistic applications running in the background, using memory, etc. Call me anal, that's just the way I am.

However, today I was texting my wife some dirty, adult-only stuff and vice versa and noticed a terrible (yet consistent) problem with the stock messaging application: sometimes it shows the wrong contact in the correct thread. So I almost texted my aunt some very inappropriate things that I am nearly ashamed to even say out loud.

So off to switch to either Handcent or ChompSMS, the two leading third party messaging apps. Now the first and most important thing to remember when installing a third party messaging application is to DISABLE the notifications under Menu > Settings in the stock messaging application, otherwise you will get two notifications. This is by far the most common problem I see with the Droid as a whole!

Anyhow, so the benefits to using Handcent over Chomp are somewhat numerous, including multiple different chat setups (with Chomp you can customize colors but mostly it looks like the iPhone SMS setup), etc. However, one issue I ran into with Handcent on a fairly regular basis I was getting double text messages. Not notifications, but rather the same message would come through twice, despite having "auto retrieve" messages disabled in the stock messaging settings. This drives me up a wall.

So I decided to go with ChompSMS. It's free on the Market (as is Handcent).

Here are some of the positives about ChompSMS:

* iPhone look-alike. Yeah yeah, iPhone sucks, but honestly I always liked their SMS app look.
* Popup. Should you so desire, a quick reply popup can be enabled for you instead of having to go into the actual program every time. I keep this option disabled, but it's a nice feature.
* Change the color of the notification LED light
* Change the vibrate pattern (makes it easier to feel when in your pocket)

Feel free to comment on your thoughts between Handcent, Chomp, the stock messaging app, etc.

Don't buy a car charger from Best Buy

In a pinch yesterday I bought a car charger from Best Buy hoping to use it while navigating. However, the stock charger from Moto is 850ma output and the Rocketfish they sell at Best Buy only outputs 600ma. It barely breaks even when navigating with the screen on.

Calling all Homerun Battle 3d players

YouTube video here.

If you haven't played hrb3d yet, you're missing out. Quite possibly one of the most addicting games on the Droid, you can find it for 4.99 on the market. Think of it as one of those addicting games your co-workers send you to keep you distracted instead of working.

Just to give you an idea of how addicting it is, I hate baseball. I am much more a hockey fan and yet I'm still addicted. If you want to match up online for some competition, add me to your rival list: MJ110607

My mom is in the hospital right now and so I have been logging quite a few hours playing this game during my down time.

Custom Icons

For updated post see here.

(this page is kept intact for Google search purposes)

What would a Droid be without customization?

For quite some time I resisted rooting my Droid. You might be asking...what is rooting? Rooting is the Droid equivalent of jailbreaking an iPhone.

After much reading I decided to root my phone and use Pete's Bugless Beast. I actually wrote a very in depth, nearly idiot proof guide on how to root, install Bugless Beast, and many other things over on droidforums.net. You can find that link here:

[How To] Easily install Bugless Beast using only SPRecovery, Terminal Emulator, & zip

What are the benefits of rooting?

* overclocking
* custom themes or looks
* more control over the phone
* and much more

It technically voids your warranty, but hell, you can get back to stock pretty easily. Also included in the above link are links to Pete's official thread on Alldroid.org, and much more.

First post!

So here we have the first post at droid-does.blogspot.com. What I'd like to do is start this off with a little background on me and the phone. I got my phone in January and have been using it day in and out since then. I bought it used on eBay for about 400 dollars. Since then I have been very active at droidforums.net (Matth3w) learning about the phone and trying to help people.

I decided today to start a blog about the phone, news about the phone, some downloads, hacks, and customization of the phone, etc. Probably some app reviews etc. I would love for people to send me suggestions for the blog as well. Anything and everything Droid goes...

I'm not great at introductions so off I go to talk about the Droid and what I've done in the next post. Happy Droiding!