we put together another quick video tutorial to help you with your battery drain issues. basically it comes down to the number of apps your phone is running when you aren’t using it. if in standby mode and you have 15 apps running, you can said “bye bye” to your battery.

we use an app called advanced task killer which is free through the market and is a must have…

went to bed with 2/3 of a battery and woke up this morning with a dead phone. at first i thought it was just a screen freeze up, but then after turning it back on realized i had 2% of my battery left.

as you can see from this forum post, battery drain has become quite the topic.

as a point of reference, i do not turn my phone off at night and just leave it in standby mode. still, dropping from 60-70% to a dead phone in about 6 hours with just syncing and background stuff working is quite a drain.

one quick tip:  before going to bed, use the app “advanced task killer” and kill off any running apps before shutting those eyes for the night.  this might eliminate all those unauthorized background tasks from killing your phone.

anyone else with battery drain issue?  any fixes besides turning off my background tasks?

at first glance, these pics look pretty sharp. and then you blow them up or really focus in and you can see that the camera is still under-performing for a 5MP camera. oh well, still fun!

i can get my droid to mount on my windows 7 machine without hesitation.  however, when i try to mount it to my windows xp machine, it can’t figure out what the hell to do.

apparently google and android developers have been using a fixed usb driver that seems to work.  you can download it here:

http://dl.google.com/android/android_usb_windows.zip

some people have also suggested that you just use a different data cable than the one provided in the droid box.  as far as i know, the data cables for new blackberry devices should work.

with the first actual live video we took with the motorola droid’s camera, we captured this from in the rose garden arena. some views of the crowd and then a focus on the jumbotron. it’s not awful quality, but not superb. i will say that we’ve come a long way since 1MP flip phone cameras haven’t we?

in about 10 minutes i’ll be off to check out the detroit pistons vs. the portland trail blazers here in oregon and plan on snapping a ton of pics.  i’m definitely going to put this droid camera through the ringer tonight and hopefully it pulls down some nice caps.  so stay tuned as i’ll be uploading throughout the game similarly to a live feed. should be fun!

ran into my first bug last night and i have no idea what it stemmed from.  basically, after a day of playing with my new motorola droid, my sound went almost to silent.  at first i thought it was my locale profiles going a little whacky, but an uninstall of that didn’t fix the problem.  i also played with the actual sound settings manually and nothing seemed to work.

basically, when i had someone try to call me, the ringtone was about as faint as you can get.  and if i hung up on the person, the volume would then crank up to its normal level for a split second.  too weird.

so what fixed it?  a reboot.  i call it a reboot because this is really a computer and sometimes, after a tough day of tweaks, you need a reboot and a fresh start.

anyone else experience a sound bug?