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I wrote my initial review of the Motorola Admiral (my new phone) about three and a half days after getting my hands on it. I’ve been using the phone full-time for almost two weeks now, so wanted to follow up with a few other thoughts. You should definitely read the initial review above to put these additional notes into context.

• It’s annoying I can’t turn off camera shutter sound; reportedly I might be able to accomplish this by rooting, but haven’t been brave enough to try that yet.
• The screen [in]sensitivity is still occasionally an issue / mild annoyance (confirmed by at least one other person on forums, too–without a screen protector). I still occasionally launch an app or click a link when trying to scroll. I haven’t removed the screen protector yet, but it’s sort of on my to-do list, based on comments from many people indicating it’s wholly unnecessary.
• The lack of a d-pad/trackpad/trackball/arrow keys/ok button is annoying in a couple regards: this makes life with ConnectBot (SSH) much more difficult, and while Android 2.3’s touch-based cursor navigation is an improvement over earlier versions, it’s still not nearly as easy/accurate as arrow keys/etc. (I do this quite frequently when I type my email address at the end of an email, since I prefer the first letter to be uncapitalized, even though I know it doesn’t really matter; I use the default setting of capitalizing the first letter of any sentence/line, so have to type the letter twice, then go back and delete the first one that was capitalized. That’s what email signatures are for, you say? Nah, I don’t *always* want my address at the end, just for more formal things.)
• I saw one apparently spontaneous reboot. The phone was connected to USB (none), screen was off, and the phone was just sitting there; the screen spontaneously turned on with multi-colored static for a second, then rebooted. It was unsettling, but didn’t seem to hurt anything.
• I did uncover one actual problem using the zoom to fit screen display mode. In Go SMS Pro, there’s an option to draw a picture and send the image [as a link]. When using the ‘zoom’ display mode, finger presses on the screen don’t correspond with where the drawing ends up on the screen, so it’s essentially impossible to make things line up correctly in a drawing. Using ‘full screen’ mode for that app eliminates that problem.

Overall I still quite like the phone, and the battery has been lasting me two days off the charger with: ~5 web pages loaded over 1xrtt or 3g per day; 1-2 bars of signal most of the day; use WiFi at home, turned off otherwise; a handful of standard and Google Voice text messages; a couple phone calls; maybe one Youtube video; K9 IMAP IDLE (push) going all the time, and forced syncs every hour. The keyboard’s been quite good to me, and I’m getting much better at un-learning my muscle memory for the shift and alt keys being swapped from their location on the Treo, and different alt-key/symbol locations; the number layout on the keyboard still pisses me off considerably, though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 at 15:13 and is filed under General, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.