The Droid Pocket Guide covers the Droid brand of mobile phones made by Motorola and HTC Corp., sold in the United States by Verizon Wireless.
If you’re using a Droid in another country or on another carrier, some screens and icons may look slightly different, but you should still be able to find your way around pretty easily with this Pocket Guide.
The book covers two Droid handsets on the market as of February 2010: the Droid (Motorola) and the Droid Eris (HTC). I will refer to both handsets as Droid unless I specifically want to differentiate something that’s specific to the Droid Eris.
The Droid runs Android version 2.0, and the Droid Eris runs Android version 1.5. Because all Droids should be able to run Android 2.x by the time you read this book, I focus on Android 2.0 herein.
Another cosmetic difference is that the Droid runs the stock version of Android, whereas the Droid Eris runs a customized Android user interface that HTC calls the Sense user interface, or Sense UI.
This means that some icons and screens on the Droid Eris will be slightly different from those featured in this book, but don’t panic; most of the functionality is the same on both Droid phones.
If you’re running a version of Android earlier than 2.0.1, some features covered in this book may not be available. I recommend that you upgrade your Droid’s software to the latest version to take advantage of the newest features and bug fixes. You can upgrade by visiting the appropriate Web page:
http://support.vzw.com/information/droid_upgrade.html
http://support.vzw.com/information/droid_eris_upgrade.html
Finally, it’s important to note that because of Android’s open-source foundation, any wireless carrier can modify the look and feel of Android to suit its needs. For this reason, some screens, icons, and behaviors may be slightly different from what you find in this book.
As you start down the path to mastering the Droid, having some background information will help you form a good foundation of knowledge to build on.
In this chapter, I review some background on Google and Android, and discuss how the Droid came to be.
Then I dive right into the phone itself, its features, what comes in the box, and some user-interface tips and tricks.