Bernard Meisler

Well I’ve been rocking the Droid for two weeks now (and yeah, I’m gonna keep it!), so I figured I should make one final post concerning what I still like about it (or like even more), what’s starting to bug me, and what I miss about the iPhone. I also wanted to address the hit piece in Barrons last week, Avoid the Droid?, which stated, among other things, “It’s less intuitive, attractive and functional [than the iPhone]. It doesn’t sync music from computers, and it disappoints even as a basic phone.”

My greatest happiness is derived from the evil overlords of the Verizon network. Despite the diss of the phone’s voice quality in the Barron’s article (they compared the Droid’s voice quality to a Verizon Samsung phone, NOT an iPhone), I’m much happier with the Droid than the iPhone for both voice quality and reception – two separate issues oftentimes not treated as such. My friends say things like, “Hey, you answered your phone!” and (surprised) “I can hear you pretty good!” I can make and receive calls from both of my SF work locations (which I could not do with the iPhone), as well as being able to surf web, get texts and emails, etc (iPhone again failed me here). My wife has a Samsung Alias, which is a GREAT phone as far as voice quality goes – using it is how I realized how bad the iPhone quality is – and the Droid is probably not as good as the Samsung. But saying it’s a poor telephone is a bit much, especially when comparing it to the iPhone, which is actually a glorified answering machine.

I’d agree with the Barron’s review that the general Droid UX is not up to snuff with the iPhone – but then again, what is? Using an iPhone gives you a warm and cozy feeling – everything more or less works as you’d expect and is easy to figure out – Apple’s strong point across the board. The Droid is definitely less intuitive and less consistent. I like the dedicated back button, but both it and the menu button seem to work differently depending on context and app you’re in. For instance, it took me a while to figure out that when you click the magnifying glass to open up the url location field and the virtual keyboard, pressing the back button closes the virtual keyboard and shows you your bookmarks.

Speaking of the browser, it crashes a lot, and has a funny way of telling you. When it can’t get a connection, and you try to press the “go” button, click one of your bookmarks, it “buzzes” you, a small vibration Android refers to as “Haptic feedback.” The bad part is, it will keep buzzing you, then will finally put up a dialog box saying something to the effect that the browser can’t make a connection. When you press the cancel button, the browser works again.

I don’t like the email client for reading my non-Google email accounts. Perhaps there’s a better 3rd party solution. The gmail client is solic, but it’s hard to scroll – when you make a downward swiping motion, the phone keeps thinking you’re clicking on a particular message to read it, and it will open up that message. A pain when you’re trying to find an email from yesterday. This lack of sensitivity in the touch screen is probably my main complaint about the Droid. Not to mention no “pinching”, just double-taps to increase/decrease the resolution. The iPhone wins this one hands down.

For the most part, the Android apps store is way behind iPhone, but for the most part, I don’t care. The only app I really miss – a lot – is the Kindle. I loved reading via Kindle on the iPhone. Strangely enough, a number of iPhone users I mentioned this to didn’t even know it existed! Oh well, hopefully Amazon will get on the ball soon and deliver an Android version. On the other hand, the Android implementation of Google maps is fantastic, much better than the iPhone maps. And if you get bored of Earth (as I so often do), you can check out the amazing Google Sky Maps – “discover and browse the night sky just by pointing your phone to space.” It works. Awesome fun.

I couldn’t disagree more with the Barron’s complaint about the difficulty of syncing music. First of all, once you use the free third-party app doubleTwist, syncing is better than with just plain iTunes (which leaves a lot to be desired), as you don’t need to make playlists anymore. You can also easily copy music from the Droid to your (or any) computer! The real failing (which is entirely Apple’s fault) is that videos and music bought from the iTunes store do not work on any non-Apple devices. Everyone should write Apple a nasty letter about that, especially since Steve Jobs claims that Apple doesn’t like DRM.

But forget about media for a moment, I’m loving not having to sync the phone at all for my contacts and calendar info! I’ve installed my Google calendar on my MacBook Pro’s copy of iCal. When I make an addition to the iCal calendar now, it shows up automatically on the phone! I’m using more and more Google apps – Reader, Finance, etc – and not having to sync at all is great. My iPhone always seemed to mess up my contacts and calendar, and I don’t miss having to sync frequently at all. It also bothered me how it would automatically open iPhoto everytime I plugged the iPhone in my Mac, even if I didn’t have photos I wanted to import, but it wouldn’t open iTunes automatically even though you couldn’t do any real syncing without it. I love auto-syncing!

One last word about Apple being a pain the ass – I’ve not had the time to do any Android development beyond a Hello World tutorial, but Google is making it much easier to join the Android development program. They charge $25, instead of $100 that Apple demands, plus they don’t ask you to fax them your articles of incorporation as Apple does, and take a month getting back to you! A nice metaphor for the general openness of Android and the Droid and the walled garden of Apple.

The bottom line – if they had iPhone on Verizon, that would be my choice. But they don’t, and I got tired of waiting for it, so I’m happy with my Droid. How happy? Well, my original intention was to get a Droid and also carry around an iPod touch for media and general usability for web surfing, whenever I was near a WiFi connection. It didn’t take more than 2 or 3 days to decide to foregoe the iPod touch (in a classic Apple move of planned obsolescence, of which they are the masters, the iPod touch does not have a camera!) And of course, both the Droid – with its interchangeable battery and memory card – and Android the OS – will continue to get better and better – this is Google after all, not those clowns at Palm…