Droid versus iPhone

iUnPhone

After dealing with dropped calls, no signal, and relatively poor customer service from AT&T, I decided it was time for a change.

Yes, I love my iPhone. It is by far the most functional smart phone I’ve ever owned. The UI for just about everything on the phone is well designed, making the typical smartphone apps actually usable. I’ve never used email, calendar, IM, SMS, or a phone camera this much on any of the half-dozen other smartphones I’ve owned during the past decade.

But… and this is a big but… what good is a smartphone without the phone part? Not receiving calls from clients when I’m working from the home office is a drag. Dropping calls anytime I drive over one of the 3 bridges between the house and the office sucks. And my clients receiving calls while on a lunch outing while I have ZERO bars makes it hard to justify the iPhone as a serious business tool.

However, during the past 2 years, nobody has had a decent iPhone comptetitor. Until now. Verizon’s announcement of the new Droid by Motorola certainly piqued my interest. The large touch screen, many downloadable apps, an open platform by Google, and running on one of the best networks in the area, what more could I ask for?

This month it was time to give my beloved iUnPhone some competition to decide whether I remain a begrudged AT&T customer or join the millions of Verizon fans.

A Week With Droid

Let me start with some initial feedback after my first week of playing with the Droid.   In short, here I am nearly 7 full days with the Droid and already I’m thinking “how long will it be before I return it, 3 more days, another week?”.   Now don’t get me wrong.  This phone is not that bad.  Far from it.    But is certainly can be aggravating at times.  It simply is not as refined as the iPhone.    In some areas, not even close; and that’s a BIG deal.

Yeah, I want my phone to work as a phone.  But I’ve come to realize I use it just as much as a communication device.  These days that means that I use the phone part for communication about 40% of the time.  The other 60% of the time you’ll find me on email, text messaging, or instant messaging.    In fact I use email about 40% of the time as well, so good email features is a must.   Realistically 90% of the places I’m using the other communication methods I’m in a WiFi hot spot, at my home, or at my office.   Everyplace on the map seems to be bathed in open access WiFi signals, so this really hasn’t be a problem.

Droid Peeves

So therein lies a major problem with Droid.  It is not nearly as refined as the iPhone.  Every turn seems to bring a new challenge with Droid. There are many examples of gotchas and “are you kidding me?” moments.  Some of those that have become more than a minor annoyance are outlined in the following paragrphs.

Peeve #1 : Organizing Mail

Yes, it has Google Mail which works wonderfully with my Google Apps Premium account.  BUT (and there are many buts with Droid) it uses an arcane label system which does not allow for quick & easy drill-down like folders.   While this may not be a problem for most users, I have over 3,000 labels to manage 5 major client projects at a time.    There is nothing like scrolling through pages & pages of labels to find the one you want when sorting mail.   The iPhone system also talks to Google and it turns the labels into folders.  This is a clear win for the iPhone.

Peeve # 2 : Screen Response

At first I thought it was just me.  Then I thought it was just the apps I was using.  Then I started to realize the every-so-often, just for the sport of it, different areas of the touch screen become non-responsive.   Or they do respond but respond incorrectly.   For example, click on the camera icon on the home page and it launces maps.  Or playing a Gems-like game and you periodically can’t interact with any element on the bottom right quadrant of the screen.    Or go to work a slider and the slider moves halfway then stops.   Very annoying.

Peeve #3 : Placing Icons

Where the iPhone really shines is with the UI.  Everything in intuitive.  Put icons on the desktop and they arrange themselves in ways that make sense.  You can move them around and they stay where  you put them.   On the Droid, even after 7 days, I can’t for the life of me figure out why certain icons snap to certain points on the screen.  It’s not alphabetical.  It’s certainly not where I placed the icon.   Worst of all, I can’t seem to easily move the icons where I want them other than dump them on one of the THREE (yeah, just 3) available shortcut pages on the phone.  I’m sure there is an explanation, maybe even a tutorial, but I never needed to go through training to use anything on the iPhone.

Droid Shining Moments

While there are a lot of other minor annoyances with the new Droid, there are a few shining examples of better technology when compared with the iPhone.  All of these elements are fairly significant, which makes it very hard to choose a clear winner between the two phones.   Some of my favorite features on the new Droid are noted below.

Kudo #1 : Call Clarity

You’d think two similar phones would have similar audio qualities.  They are both about the same form factor and use similar speaker and microphone technology.  But alas, the Droid is a clear winner in the clarity of calls.   The voices are clearer at any volume, so much so that when going back to the iPhone I feel like I’m listening to worn out cassette recording versus a top-notch production CD.   People on the other end of the calls always tell me that the new phone sounds 10x better; and that may not be an exaggeration.

Kudo #2 : Screen Resolution

Damn this is a nice screen.  The iPhone screen is great, or so I thought.   This screen is just that much better.  It’s hard to point out the exact differences but it is more than just my 3-year-old’s fingerprints all over the iPhone.  The screen seems brighter and clearer than the iPhone in almost every way.   The icons seem a little crisper, but where I really notice the difference is when reading email.

Kudo #3 : The Slideaway Keyboard

I’ve never been a fan of PDA/smartphone keyboards.  They just never seem t work well.   However I found myself using the slideout keyboard to quickly type emails on the new Droid.  Though it took me a couple of days to get used to the keyboard, I can now bang out an email or text message much more quickly than on either the iPhone or Droid on-screen keyboards.   I’ve read other reviews about how the Droid keyboard is lacking, but I guess since I’ve not used a keyboard like this in nearly 8 years now, this keyboard seems like a winner to me.  Maybe it’s not as good as a Blackberry or other smartphone keyboards, but I wouldn’t know.  Having been away from a keyboard for so long this seems like light years ahead of those I remember.  It responds well and leave all that screen real-estate for reviewing my compositions on the fly.  Nicely done for such a small package.

The Comparison : Pros & Cons

So while there are a few main things I like and dislike about the new Droid, there are a lot of smaller good & bad items to be accounted for.  In addition, I need to decide which device to keep for the next 12 months.   So here is my comparison of the pros & cons for each.

Comparison : Head-To-Head

Feature	Motorola Droid	iPhone 1st Gen
Application Quality
Device Controls (power,volume,etc.)
Photo Quality
MP3 Sound Quality
Network Coverage
Screen Resolution
Text/Media Messaging
Touchscreen
Video Recording
Visual Voicemail

The Summary

So while there are some really great things and some really aggravating issues that come with the new Droid, overall this is not an easy call.   Both devices are great in their own way, and I’d not be disappointed to be “stuck” using one over the other.  However, when it comes down to it, buying a new phone that locks me into a 2 year contract, costs $500 to get all new accessories plus the phone, costs $25 more/month for the same service plan; it becomes hard to justify the switch to Verizon.   Maybe if the plan was less expensive.  Or if more accessories were included.  Or I got ALL of my calls at the home office.   Bottom line, the call quality and network coverage is 10x better with Verizon.  Unfortunately I use my smartphone as so much more than a phone, and on those points the iPhone wins hands down.

Who knows, since I’m on a month-to-month with AT&T, maybe Verizon will find me back on their doorstep after the v1.0 release kinks are worked out.   Sometimes being the first to own something isn’t such a great thing; just ask me about my Z4 some day.

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