Beyond that, our fingers have oils and they will be deposited on the screen over time. If you don't clean the screen, then the pattern emerges even if you use the touch screen to scroll. So it's likely that an moderately clever person could open your phone easily. Now given the helpful password caching the email programs have—and there does't appear to be a way to disable password caching in either email program—if someone gets your phone, they get your email and anything else that is unlocked. This is obviously a huge shortcoming if you tend to misplace your phone.
A relevant aside: a recent survey of New York taxi drivers by Credant Technologies found that on average around 5,000 mobile phones a month more than 500 other handheld devices, including iPods, laptops and memory sticks, are left in cabs every month. Clearly, the ability to lock your phone is pretty important.
Geeking Out
Like many of you, I want to do more with my phone than play music and games. I want to be productive. When I first had my Treo 700P, I was trying out a demo of a Windows Terminal Services program. I was traveling, and we had a server issue that needed my attention. I had no Wi-Fi and no time to go look for power and a signal. So I fired up Terminal Services on my Treo and after a lot of zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth, I fixed the issue. Oh, and I still made my flight. I was hooked. Between Terminal services and an SSH client, there wasn't anything I couldn't fix.
On the Droid, there are fun apps like Find Starbucks, but there are many useful apps for the IT geek in all of us. These are all free or ad supported:
- Advanced Task Killer. The name says it all. You can kill one or more tasks quickly and easily.
- Android VNC Viewer, again, the name is the function, a VNC client on Android.
- Astro file manager is good for managing files and even as a back-up utility to back-up apps and data to the micro SD card. I haven't yet found an app to back-up off of the device and considering that the micro SD card is buried beneath the battery, it's unlikely I'm going to be swapping cards frequently.
- Bar Code Scanner: Scanning bar codes is fun. Besides, based on the bar code, it will launch a search for the item and can even detect whether it is a book (launching a book search) or something else.
- ConnectBot SSH client is a sweet little client for getting SSH or telnet access to a remote host. It even handles color terminals well. Since the Droid keyboard layout has many common keys available like forward slash, etc, the only tricky items are Control and Escape key combinations. ConnectBot uses the center button on the 5-way rocker for Control (one click) and Escape (two clicks). ConnectBot makes use of the Droid's gestures, letting you scroll up and down in the terminal as well as open and moving between simultaneous sessions.
- Google Voice. Yes, that's right, you can load and use Google Voice on your Droid. The app even lets you decided which calls to let Google Voice handle, all Calls, no calls or just International calls. You can also just set it up for voicemail.
- Photoshop.com Mobile for doing simple edits on photos like toning, adjusting color balance, cropping and rotating. The actions are pretty quick, too.
- Sound Manager lets you quickly adjust your sound setting and has a desktop widget that will mute and unmute your phone with one press.
The Droid is a cool, fun appliance with a lot of functionality, though it still falls short in a few key areas for enterprise use. It will be fun to see what they'll include in the next upgrade. People are going to be using this phone, so it's worth getting ready.
