Hello Droid - Day 1

After many days of deliberation, I have decided that it was time to make a move.  The iPhone is one of the greatest technology innovations of the last 20 years.  It is the best mobile consumer device ever - both in terms of design and impact.  So why Droid?  The answer has one A, two T's, and and ampersand.  This said company has now admitted what we in the Bay Area have know for years.  The coverage and download speeds in the San Francisco Bay Area and NY city are less than spectacular.

Like many US cities, the Bay Area is a two carrier town.  How many times have I had to borrow a friend's Verizon phone to make a call?  Numerous.  How many times has a Verizon friend asked to borrow my AT&T iPhone to make a call.  None.  Why?  They have coverage when I do not.  If they do not have coverage, I surely don't either.

The second reason I wanted to check out the Droid is email.  I use Gmail regulary, and my 1st generation iPhone's email is excrutiatingly slow.  The email experience is eerily reminscient of the dial-up days of Internet.  Remember?  Anxiously wait while logging in to your AOL account with a 14.4 kbps modem to download 2 emails.  No, I am not nostalgic for those days.  The Droid's email if far superior to the iPhone.  It is easy to setup push email to a Gmail account, and you can get email alerts as well.  Searching for info on Gmail, as to be expected, is far superior on the Droid.  I am still getting all the email settings tweaked on the Droid, but so far the email experience is already showing great performance and usability advantages.

Despite my flimsy iPhone case, I still ended up succeeding in cracking the screen after an unfortunate drop.  To the credit of the iPhone, it had experienced some serious drops prior to finally showing cracks - literally.  So one of the first orders of business is to protect my new robot phone.  I searched on Amazon and saw a few dozen different cases.  With the pull out keyboard, the choice of Droid cases is not quite as simple as the iPhone.  So rather than simply pay and pray on Amazon, I decided to go through the dreaded Fry's experience.  Big mistake.  There were around 40 different iPhone cases to choose from, where they seemed to have only one Droid case.  So now it's back to Amazon for the case.

Day 1 - Droid vs iPhone.

Usability:
WINNER - iPhone (LANDSLIDE)
The first day I used the iPhone, the usability was amazing, intuitive and magical (touch scroll, flick, and zoom - clear wow factor on these.)
The Droid is fantastically complex.  You have to get used to the application tool bars, which are far from intuitive.  Completing tasks are less than obvious, and beware the back button.  Apps tend to be left in the condition you last left, which sometimes is disorienting.  Toggling between different email accounts can be confusing.

Keyboard:
WINNER - Droid (slight)
The iPhone's onscreen keyboard is ok at best, and a little annoying at worst.  The Droid's pull out keyboard is better, but not as huge an improvement over the on-screen keyboard, at least on day 1.  Let's see if this keyboard advantage grows over time.

Email:
WINNER - Droid (LANDSLIDE)
Push email, email alerts, superior search (as mentioned above).  Google knows email well.  Nice integration with Android.

One Major Annoying Missing Feature of the Droid:
Apple does a great job is identifying and activating phone # links.  So instead of having to type in a telephone number, you just hit the link and the number is dialed.  The Droid does not seem to have this phone # intelligence that the iPhone does.  This is going to be a huge backward step as I use this iPhone feature all the time.

That's pretty much it for now.  I have not had a chance to check out the apps, maps, camera, phone quality, battery lift, and search yet.  As I get more familiar with the Droid, I can document some of the other differences between the iPhone and Droid, at least for my usage patterns.

To be fair to the iPhone, I had the pre-3G version, so the Droid has a huge advantage in terms of speed over the 1st Gen iPhone.  I am not so big on apps and games, so Droid will probably fit my requirements better than some who use apps and games a lot.  I love the iPhone interface and the browsing (except for the speed) was good.  Phone quality was very suspect, so I expect the Droid to outperform the iPhone in that domain.

It is a shame that the iPhone is not on Verizon, so comparisons could be conducted carrier-independent.  As all iPhone users know all too well, the carrier matters!  So until Steve decides to play nice with Verizon, the iPhone must be judged with the limitations and weaknesses of its carrier partner.