For the last few months I have been carrying two smart phones:
- Motorola Droid on Verizon
- HTC Nexus One on T-Mobile
I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two phones, and it’s a close call.
The Droid has a few advantages. The physical keyboard is very welcome, but I find myself using the virtual keyboards more and more, and I also find myself using voice input more often. Voice input used to be pretty miserable, but lately I have noticed a dramatic improvement in the precision. The resolution is slightly higher on the Droid screen, but it’s not a huge difference (480×854 vs 480×800). Both screens are stunningly good, particularly compared to the iPhone, which has a pretty mediocre screen. The speaker on the Droid is dramatically better, though some people might find it weird that I sometimes listen to podcasts through the speaker instead of using headphones. Sometimes I put it on speakerphone and set it on the table – the sound is very good through the speaker on the Droid.
The Nexus One has a few advantages as well. It’s thinner and lighter than the droid. It has rounded corners that make it pleasant to hold. The processor seems slightly faster, though this may be the software release that they are running. It lacks the physical keyboard, but I don’t seem to miss it as much as I thought I would. It is supposed to eventually get a car dock and a home dock, but I haven’t seen them yet. The home dock is apparently $45, which I concluded was too expensive. The trackball is very nice, and I use it all the time – in fact the droid sometimes feels clumsy to use because of the lack of a trackball.
The big difference for me has been the networks. I have been finding the T-Mobile network to be pretty marginal, but I’m not sure if it is a physical problem of the Nexus or a software problem in Android or simply that the network is lacking. Note that I haven’t made any attempt to measure network coverage over a large area, and you should be very careful of people saying one network is better or worse than the other. People tend to use their phones in a very few areas and draw conclusions about coverage over the entire USA, which is clearly misguided. All of the mobile networks have strong areas and weak areas. The verizon network won’t work at all in most parts of the world. I find that 95% of my phone usage is at home, a work, and in a hotel. In all of these places I usually have Wifi, so the mobile network is largely irrelevant there. With all these disclaimers, I am uncomfortable saying that the Verizon network is better than the T-Mobile network. When I travel to Europe, the Verizon Droid will be incapable of making or receiving phone calls, so it will stay home.
So which one would I recommend? The Droid, by a slight margin. On the other hand, my employer is paying for the data plan, and the answer might change if I was paying for the data plan, because frankly I doubt that I would buy a data plan – I’d buy an unlocked Nexus and use APNDroid to turn off cellular data access.
Would I recommend them instead of the iPhone? The iPhone is clearly a good phone, but I haven’t had a chance to use one at great length. I sincerely despise iTunes, which is one reason why I could never tolerate an iPhone. I find a lot of the value from a smart phone in the applications, and I find nothing lacking in the Android applications. People talk about having 100,000 applications on the iPhone but only 20,000 on Android, but that seems like a completely ridiculous comparison. It only matters if the 20 applications that you really want are available on the phone you want. If you are already an iPhone user, then you have already had your head bent to the Apple way of doing things, so it’s unlikely that you will be happy on an Android phone. I’ve observed a discussion among iPhone users who complain about differences, but almost all of the complaints are that things are done differently, rather than things can’t be done. The two phones offer very similar feature sets, but you should never expect things to be exactly identical.
I wonder what phones will look like two years from now!