Droid gives iPhone competetion during holiday season

By Victor Powell / Contributing Editor

published: Thu, 10 Dec, 2009

Motorola’s new Droid phone is almost the iPhone killer that everyone seems to want it to be — almost.

The Droid, the brainchild of Motorola, Google and Verizon, is the latest device to try, once again, to dethrone the iPhone as the De Facto smart phone.

To start, let’s look at the pros.

Setup was a breeze. It came with a pre-installed Facebook application, so all I had to do was log in, and it imported my friends’ contact info onto the phone.

A great new feature is its ability to run multiple apps at the same time, allowing me to check my e-mail while listening to Pandora Radio, a long-missed amenity on the iPhone.

In addition to Pandora Radio, the Android Market (Google’s equivalent to Apple’s App Store) offers roughly 10,000 apps with equivalents to most major iPhone apps, andthe number of Droid apps is poised to increase significantly without the strict restrictions Apple places on its app approval process. Also, most apps give you a variety of settings. For example, the Browser app allows you to change the text encoding for viewing webpages to Unicode (UTF-8). I don’t know why I’d ever want to do that, but I’m glad to know the option is available.

With the exception of the Droid’s replaceable 16 GB microSD memory card and five megapixel camera and flash, the hardware of the two devices is almost identical, and so are their prices: $199 for the phone with a new data plan, with unlimited data plans starting at about $30 per month.

Now for the the cons.

With the iPhone and Apple’s iTunes, my phone is automatically backed up every time I connect it to my computer to recharge. It just does it. I don’t have to worry about transferfing my contacts or trying to download my friends’ phone numbers via their Facebook profiles.

The Droid has a keyboard, but it’s almost completely flat, which does little to help those with fat fingers. Consequently, it’s also heavier than the iPhone, and while I was using the Droid, the back panel slipped off a few times when I would pull it out of my pocket. Another point of frustration was its lack of gestures for its multi-touch screen — common to the iPhone — such as “pinch-to-zoom.” Ironically, this is because Apple holds a copyright on such gestures. (On a related note of copyrighting, the term “Droid” is actually on loan from Lucasfilm, the creators of “Star Wars.”)

Being able to run multiple apps at a time sounds like a good idea at first, but the reality is that mobile phones are not desktop computers, and increasing the number of apps running at a given time significantly reduces battery life, as well as performance. An application you’re running in the background might freeze and crash, but you’ll never notice it until your battery dies an hour later.

From a more technical perspective, I was very irritated with the lack of a consistent user interface (or UI) for the Droid. It seems less responsive than the iPhone. For example, some apps look like Web pages made in the early ’90s, or it will lag slightly when I scroll. With the iPhone, Apple has provided an extensive and consistent UI framework to its app developers, so I can spend less time learning how to use an app and more time just using it.

At the end of the day, an iPhone will do most things you’ll want it to do well and often automatically. On the other hand, the Droid will do anything you’d ever want it to and leave you up to discovering whather or not you really wanted to. With that said, I’d have to recommend the iPhone for normal to text-savvy users and leave the Droid to the extremely tech-savvy power users.