DROIDICAL

I saw a Motorola Bluetooth headset on sale at Amazon and decided to go for it.  Always wanted to be wire free but didn’t have a new enough device to take advantage of it, nor could I bare to even think about spending the type of money have have wanted for them.  There are better deals out there than before.

Take the one I got for example… 40$-ish from Amazon after shipping and tax, seemed like a decent enough deal (I think I missed this when they sold it at Verizon store for 24$ in one of their 24 hour sales).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d.html/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/190-7720955-1250669?a=B002BH3I9U

Not really wanting to do a full review of the Motorola S305 headset for the Droid.  Suffice to say I can pair it and listen to music without having to mess with wires while working or working out.  Very cool feature that I did not realize about this headset is that it also has a mic built in.  If I get a call while wearing them I can answer as if I was wearing my regular bluetooth ear piece. I may shift it over to my mac for skype usage as well.

The *squelched* in the title really has nothing to do with the actual headset but with Android Bluetooth support.  Summary is that while a Bluetooth audio device will pair with your Android phone you can’t use any of the controls on the remote device to trigger functionality in Android. The most obvious is limited ability to push a ‘talk’ button on your Bluetooth ear piece it won’t do anything on your voice like… open the voice dialer.  Similarly, my new fancy headset has skip/repeat/pause/volume controls which do nothing on the Droid.

A lot of people discovered this when they bought the Droid and were a little upset in some cases and ready to return the device.

https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/15939

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?tid=68ee7bd469245477&hl=en

http://androidcommunity.com/forums/f41/voice-dial-and-bluetooth-4999/

So if you go through and read a bunch of these the deeper developer types will tell you it’s not Motorola or HTC that is to blame but Android Bluetooth ’stack’ itself that the big G needs to improve to make this happy (so you know who to blame).  Either way it’s kind of lame…. seems like it would be priority for a phone device to get working.

One consolation is that this only came to the iPhone with the 3G update (so I read) or their latest OS release… but that’s not too consoling to me. The only thing that consoles me is to know that it’s only a software problem and not a hardware or device issues so it CAN be fixed.

If your like me you have been looking at different accessories for your Droid.  The Dock is a cool idea.  I got to checking out the reviews of the dock and I agree with most people’s comments that it would be really nice if it had either audio out ability or speakers.  Still would like to have a nice alarm clock type functionality like that.

Dock Runner started floating around the interwebs yesterday (at least that’s when I caught it) so I gave it a try. It let’s me put my Droid into ‘dock mode’ giving all the same visual features… minus the plastic stand and easy usb plugin. You get a nice big easy to see clock, date, and weather summary (based on location which you can

override or change). It also gives you quick access to typical ‘by the bedside’ needs like the alarm settings, music, media and my fav the dimmer (light bulb).

I did notice that it is a little different from running other apps because it sets this ‘dock mode’ which bottom line means it is stuck in horizontal view no matter how much I rotated. If you click away to the Music or Media apps you will still be in ‘dock mode.’ Other typcical menu and touch options seem to be disabled, like double clicking the home button (love that one), but search still worked (can’t seem to get away from that thing). The only way to disable it is to click on the app icon again which will shut it off.

So if your willing to plugin the USB for charging and having a book or something to prop up your Droid (yep, times are tough) it pretty much does the same thing as far as I can tell.  It will be interesting to see if the Droid get enough base to entice third parties to build other hard accessories using these same features.