The Droid

My Droid has been close at hand since its purchase on release day. I'm not normally an early adopter, but I have known since receiving an early-model BlackBerry from work that I desperately wanted a “smart” phone. Having heard a plethora of AT&T sob stories and remaining unimpressed by RIM's offerings, I was twiddling my thumbs in anticipation of a Verizon-carried Android phone for some time. The Droid did not disappoint.

It's my experience that most people overload machines, including phones, with tons of applications; games, environment art, etc.. I like to keep my devices as uncluttered as possible, but there are a few free applications I'm in love with for the Droid:

• Note Everything
  A simple, lightweight note taking application. Allows for drawing and dictation in addition to text.
• NYC Bus & Subway Map
  No more awkward leaning over other passengers to look at the subway map when half way to my destination I learn of a service outage. It's just a .png on the SD card; useful, though.
• ACast
  Podcast and RSS aggregation. Must have my “This American Life”, right?
• ConnectBot
  Ssh and telnet. You can get a localhost prompt, but unless you “root” your Droid you're limited to ls, cd, pwd, and other read-only command line options. There's something about rebooting a client's Apache server from my phone that's too awesome for words.

I had AndroidIRC for a while, but it refused to connect to one of the two servers I frequent; I ended up deleting it.