First of all, I've used my iPod Touch almost every day for about a year and a half now, maybe two, so it's probably a bit unfair to compare the two operating systems so soon, but it's hard not to because I often looked at my iPod Touch and wished it doubled as my phone. AT&T's lousy service and my loyalty to Verizon kept me using my old 2005 flip phone, though. So when Verizon finally got a phone that was comparable to the iPhone, it just made sense for me to check it out.
My first impressions with my Droid:
- If you use Google Voice, this is a must-have phone. I haven't used the service much in the past, but now that it integrates with the phone so intuitively, I definitely plan to use it more. It's pretty sweet!
- It integrates beautifully with most things Google, except it's oddly missing apps for Google Reader, Google Photos (Picasaweb), Google Docs, and Google Wave. I figured those would be gimmies, but I guess not. I'm sure those apps will become available in the future, though.
- The interface isn't quite as intuitive as the iPod Touch. There's no pinch gestures and you can't swipe through photos and such.
- When you reach the beginning or end of a long menu, it doesn't bounce into place like the iPod Touch, indicating that you're at the end. Sometimes I think the Droid just locked up for a second because the scrolling just stops. Gotta check the scroll bar to confirm that it's the bottom or top of the menu.
- The Droid is FAR more customizable than my iPod Touch. My iPod doesn't even have anything that compares to widgets. The settings for the Droid and individual apps provide much more control over the look, feel, layout, functionality, responses, alerts, everything. No contest here. In fact, in my opinion, the customizable options alone make it worth getting a Droid over an iPhone.
- The media player's sound quality doesn't seem to be quite as good as my iPod. Granted, the Droid is primarily a phone, not an mp3 player, unlike the iPod, and although the quality sounds the same when using headphones, the iPod sounds slightly better through my car's stereo system. Same with the Pandora app -- it sounds fine through headphones, but not through my car's stereo system.
- There's no intuitive way to sync podcasts, pictures, and videos to the Droid. The free software, DoubleTake, does an admirable job, but ya still gotta set up your media in iTunes first.
- I love swiping a security pattern on the Droid's initial unlock screen instead of entering a passcode on my iPod Touch. It's a lot quicker and just feels cooler.
- I wish Tweetdeck was available as a Droid app. Hopefully soon!
- It took me a little bit to get used to my iPod's keyboard and, unfortunately, it doesn't look like my on-screen keyboard skills are going to carry over to the Droid. I'm gonna have to get used to their on-screen and physical keyboard, too.
- When listening to music on my iPod Touch, I can double-press the home button and quickly access some media controls. With my Droid, I have to manually unlock it every time first before I can adjust volume, skip a track, or pause the song (at least as far as I know).
- I'm not sure if it's the phone or my screen protector, but there was a lot of glare when looking at the Droid in the car this morning. I could hardly read the screen. I'll turn up the brightness later today and see if that makes a difference.
- The directional pad on the Droid's physical keyboard seems pretty pointless. I mean, it works and all, but why would anyone think to even include it when you have a touch screen? I would've preferred to have a wider keyboard.
- The speaker on the Droid is surprisingly clear for phone calls, videos and music. Even at it's highest volume, there's no distortion and it sounds great.
- Google Maps definitely has a lot more functionality and features, as you might expect from a Google OS. Definitely much slicker than the iPod Touch/iPhone's Google Maps app.
- I gotta be a bit more firm when I touch the screen on the Droid than on the iPod Touch. It's not a big deal - just gotta get used to it.
- Why doesn't the default Gallery app on the Droid let me create albums like the iPod Touch does? It automatically groups pictures by date and there doesn't seem to be a way to change that.
- Google Lattitude seems to be pretty cool on the Droid, but I don't know anyone else around here to use it with me. Bummer.
- I really like having all my Droid contacts automatically sync with my Google address book and Facebook. Now I just gotta clean out my Google contacts because I have it set to automatically add everyone whose email I reply to. That's well over 1,000 people I don't remember anymore than need to be removed.
- I wish the Droid's Facebook app would let me manage my Facebook Pages and not just my personal profile. I expect that will come later with future updates, though, just like it did with the iPhone's Facebook app.
- I'm guessing that the included 16 GB mini SD card isn't really the highest quality card on the market. I transferred almost 12 GB of music to it last night and several times the transfer just stopped for no apparent reason. Forums indicate that buying a better card fixes that problem, but I just transferred data in smaller chunks instead.
- The Droid screen has a higher resolution than my iPod Touch. Its doesn't make much of a difference during normal usage of the phone, but there's a noticeably higher image quality when viewing videos on the Droid.
- Sharing media seems to be a key feature on the Droid I didn't see in other reviews. Every picture, video, and audio file has quick and easy options to share it with other people: Facebook, Gmail, MMS, Picasa, Twitter, Bluetooth, and more.
Bottom line: Given that more people will be developing apps for the Android 2.0 OS now, that Flash is soon coming to the browser, that I can multi-task several apps at once, and that Verizon's network is so solid and fast, I'm glad I held out for the Droid through the iPhone craze. I'll probably continue to use my iPod Touch for media, though.
