Here’s the section to head to when you want to control how your Droid 2 synchronizes data and how to control certain aspect of how email works. What’s odd about this section is that when you tap it, you come to only a single entry—Data Delivery. You then have to tap that to get to these settings:
Background data. Your Droid 2 regularly checks whether you’ve got email, looks for the latest weather updates, and sees whether there are updates to social networking sites you use on the Droid 2, like Facebook and Twitter. When it finds changes, it syncs them in the background. That’s a good thing, but uses up a bit of battery life. If you don’t care about having the Droid 2 check for new updates and want to save some battery life, turn this setting off.
Data Roaming. When this setting is turned on, when you’re roaming—connected to a network other than Verizon—you can send and receive data, not just make phone calls. Depending on your service plan, data roaming can be expensive, so check your plan and then decide whether to turn this ability off.
Note
To find out how to turn roaming in general on or off, see VPN Settings.
Data enabled. This lets you send and receive data over the mobile network.
Email and Corporate Sync. Tap it to set a grab-bag of email options:
Notifications. This controls whether you should be notified when you get new email, and if so, whether to use a ringtone (and if so, which to use), or whether your phone should vibrate.
Email delivery. Controls how your corporate email account and other email accounts, notably Gmail, handle getting and synchronizing mail. Tap this option, and you come to a page with three options: “Data push”, “Fetch schedule”, and “Sync over Wi-Fi only”.
To understand these settings, you need to know about something called push technology. Depending on your email service and setup, your Droid 2 may use push for some mail services—that is, as soon as mail is sent to the inbox in your server, it’s also sent to the Droid 2. In other words, the Droid 2 doesn’t have to ask the server whether there is new mail; the server automatically pushes the mail to the Droid 2.
Note
Gmail on the Droid 2 uses push, and if you have an email account that uses Microsoft Exchange, that’s a push account as well. Many other email accounts don’t use push technology, however.
If you want the Droid 2 to check for mail even if push has been turned off, or isn’t working for some reason, turn on the checkbox next to “Data push”. The Droid 2 will then regularly poll your email services to see whether there’s mail, and then fetch the mail for you. If you turn this on, you can set the interval at which the Droid 2 polls for mail, by tapping “Fetch schedule”, and then choosing anywhere from Manually to every 4 hours.
The last setting on this screen controls whether you sync your mail only when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network. If you have wireless service based on the amount of data you send and receive, consider turning on this setting if you often send and receive large files, because when you send them over Wi-Fi, it’s not counted against your data plan.
Read options. Tap this option, and you’ll be able to choose the text size, from 12, which is the smallest, to 20, which is the largest. Out of the box, the Droid 2 uses 14.
Compose options. Tap, and you can change the type of font and font size, font color, background color, and so on for the email messages you compose. You can also create and edit a signature that’s appended to the bottom of all your outgoing email.
Default email account. If you have more than one email account, tap the drop-down box to choose which should be the default—the one that you automatically use when you send email. You can always choose to send from a different account when you compose mail.
Multiselect always on. When this setting is turned on, you can tap multiple boxes to select multiple items and do something with all of them at once; for example, selecting multiple emails, and then deleting them all. As a general rule, keep this option turned on.
Social Applications. Tap this and you’ll come to a screen that controls whether you sync your social networking services such as Facebook only when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network. If you have wireless service based on the amount of data you send and receive, consider turning on this setting, because when you sync over Wi-Fi, it’s not counted against your data plan.
