From an iPhone to the Droid.

I’ve used the iPhone 3g since it first came out in mid-July back in 2008. I went through several phones before finally choosing the iPhone at that point, and the only one that was anywhere near the usability for what I wanted out of the phone was the Sprint Mogul at that time, but the iPhone still had a clear and distinct advantage over it. Between then and now, I’ve loved my iPhone overall (but there has always been a few issues I’ve had with it, some of which have been fixed and some that have not yet, and some that never will be). Only a select few phones have really piqued my interest at all since that time, and those have all been recent, such as the HTC Hero & Samsung Moment on Sprint, and the Motorola Droid on Verizon.

I went in and played a bit with both the Hero and Moment and immediately dismissed them. The Hero was slow on response and the keyboard was horrible. The Moment had the advantage of faster processor and physical keyboard, but ultimately the physical keyboard was rather foreign and poorly designed with the space bar being small and breaking the bottom row of letters. Neither of these would replace my iPhone to my satisfaction.

Enter the Droid.

I stopped by a Verizon store a couple days after the release to see how bad the Motorola phone had really missed its hype. I was blown away. This phone had a very solid sturdy feel to it, the virtual keyboard was at least as good as the iPhone’s and I felt like I made less mistakes and the “auto-correct” functionality of it was actually superior to the iPhone’s. I was rather displeased with the physical keyboard, but it did have its uses, such as typing passwords more accurately. The screen has to be seen to be believed. It’s easily the second best touch screen in responsiveness (only slightly behind the iPhone) and is far and away the best looking screen on a cell I’ve seen. It’s large (3.7 inches) and the colors pop beautifully. The camera is good, easily better than my iPhone 3g. 5MP and dual led flash make it a huge upgrade. It takes good pictures, but still isn’t a replacement for a good point and shoot. The video quality is superb, especially for a phone.

The android 2.0 base that the phone has isn’t the prettiest phone OS I’ve seen, but it’s decent and highly functional. I love the customization it offers, and I’m satisfied with the look. The auto-correct for typing is extremely well done, bringing up a list horizontally under the area you are typing in and allowing you to choose one by tapping on it or choose he “default” that is colored by hitting space or a punctuation character. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply when using the physical keyboard for some reason, so you’re stuck with exactly what you type. I’m not sure what drove this decision, but it was a poor one, IMO.

The Android Market was well stocked with useful apps, if somewhat haphazardly organized. However, the search function worked very well in finding things to what you were looking for, so this wasn’t as big of a deal as it could have been. Multitasking worked beautifully on the phone. It was quick, and snappy on every response. The web browser even had a few upsides compared to iPhone’s safari, which is still the best overall mobile browser. It would function on more of the “real web” than Safari would. For example, the toolbar at the bottom of the Facebook site would actually display and was functioning, including for Facebook chat. No pinch ‘n zoom worried me, but I actually realized that I double tapped to zoom on my iPhone more often than I actually pinched anyway. So this ended up not being a huge deal to me.

Then I pulled up a few of the cooler apps and looked through some of the basic functions of the included apps. There were quite a few things I only wished I could do on my iPhone. For example, make playlists, take an .mp3 and trim it down to a ringtone and save it to the phone, and even something as basic as deleting a song, all while on the phone. You can download some files (files that are usable by the Droid) to the phone from a web browser, instead of being limited to only the included Store. I did this for the drivesafe.ly app. The network itself, as has been pointed out repeatedly, is much better for the Droid than the iPhone as well. Verizon has been known for gutting functionality of its phones and limiting the intentions of the phones, however, the Droid with its “with Google” logo is completely unchanged by Verizon. Not a single Verizon app is even included out of the box, though they are available on the Android Market should you want some of them.

I was sold. I had decided I was getting that phone, but that I would wait until after the holidays for it. It took me the drive home to change my mind. I went back out that night and traded the iPhone & it’s crappy AT&T network for the Droid and it’s extremely solid Verizon Network without the normal negative of being at the mercy of Verizon on the phone’s software. Good trade.

The iPhone list of complaints that the Droid solves is quite long for me. I realize everyone has their own personal list of complaints, and they don’t always match up to mine. Jailbreaking your iPhone can cure a few of these complaints, but in my experience, it made the iPhone frustratingly slow and I ended up going back to Apple’s base software (this is probably much better on the iPhone 3gs, but I wasn’t shelling out more money for another Apple plus AT&T phone). The list is as follows

Can’t make playlist on phone
Can’t cut ringtones on phone
No drag and drop function from a PC/Mac
Can’t delete songs from phone
Crappy network
No downloads at all outside of the App Store
Tied to iTunes for transfers
No tethering (can’t even opt to pay extra for it, as of yet)
Proprietary plug for charging and data transfer
At the mercy of Apples senseless app approval
No Google Voice
Notifications are poorly implemented
Only 1 exchange account without paying extra per month
Bad battery (can’t remove)
Unable to get insurance on monthly bill, must buy apple care upfront
No folders for organization
No wallpapers (except on lock screen)
No way to have more than 1 Calender
Can’t multitask
Apps can’t change anything about core functions (phone, etc)
Apps can’t even change the icons included with the iPhone

And yes, the Droid seriously solves every issue on this list for me. However, a few things do take a step back with the Droid from the iPhone.

Droid’s Facebook app is ugly, doesn’t allow viewing private messages & doesn’t support Facebook chat. (you have to use other apps, or the website)
The overall user interface is not quite as intuitive. (I however, find it an even trade-off for the extra versatility of the UI)
The media player is ugly and less useful overall. There are apps to replace it however, but they still lack. (Apple does this very well, IMO)
You are limited to only 3 “Home Screens”. Folders for organization help minimize this, but it’s still a step back. (iPhone allows 11)
Due to the insecurity of an SD Card, you are limited to the internal 256MB for installation of apps. You can keep install files on the SD Card and install only when you need the app, but this is a definite limitation and a serious setback from the iPhone. I have nearly everything I could ever want installed on mine, and still have around 185MB free. (It does store some of the files the apps, such as caches and temp files, use on the SD Card. iPhone allows its entire capacity to be used).

Now, some of the coolest things I’ve found I can do with my Droid so far. It has built in free navigation from Google. The navigation is superb, with voice search and turn-by-turn voice directions. I’ve loved playing with the feature so far, and it would be extremely useful if I had actually needed it when playing with it. There are several apps that allow you to take a picture of a bar code on a product, which instead of the normal “give you price info and comparative shopping info” (which is available for the Droid as well) it will send a message to your home PC to download a torrent for that product. I know, it is illegal, but it’s still an impressive display of power and connectivity. There are a variety of apps that will allow you to connect to a FTP server and download files from it directly to the phone. This is super useful for me, as I can keep my music library on an FTP server and download something I get a strange craving to hear. I also keep all my school work on my FTP server, as a backup and a source to make it available anywhere I go. You can use PDANet for tethering (or one of several other apps that are not available on the Android Market, but online on multiple websites). Yes, these are the kind your carrier will bust you for if they find out. You can set your phone based on GPS location or time or a number of other “reasons” to do certain things. Such as “when I get to school or work based on GPS, my Droid sets it’s ringer to vibrate.” No more forgetting to silence the phone! I found this to be an extremely cool idea and app.

Multitasking and notifications are done very well. It uses a notifications bar along the top of the phone to give you ideas about what notifications have come along. If you swipe down on the bar, it brings up a window that displays all the notifications you have received (instead of placing the newest notification over the top of the rest and limiting you to only the newest like the iPhone does). Add in a task manager (many free and paid ones on the Android Market) and it will appear here in this window. You just tap it and it opens a task manager allowing you to close apps or switch to them. It’s a little less straight forward than an iPhone, but you have to be when allowing multitasking and background applications. I find it to be well done. Widgets are basically just “open apps that are pinned to the home screen”. They are somewhat useful, but I find myself not really using them much and just opening the app instead. The only widgets I really use are a Weather widget, a clock widget, a date widget, and a widget that allows easy enable/disable of several phone options (wifi, bluetooth, sgps, autosync, and auto-brightness).

So far, I’ve been overly impressed with it, especially considering I was expecting a phone that Verizon had crippled and the “Motorola of late building”. I got neither. This phone is a product of Google & Motorola, not Verizon. And this seems to be more the engineering and vision that brought us the RZR instead of the trash that Motorola has released in the years since. I wouldn’t call this an iPhone killer, as I don’t think everyone will like it better than the iPhone. However, even without the advantage of being on the Verizon network, I would say the Droid is a viable option and worthy competitor to the iPhone for anyone other than the Apple fanboys & fangirls.

It does make me wonder what Apple will do with their next iPhone to attempt to make the growing list of complaints about iPhone functionality disappear? Or will they just do what they want, and expect their customers to like it, or at least buy it anyway? I’m betting somewhere in the middle of those 2 options personally. The phone market over the next year will be very interesting, I think.