Absolutely No Machete Juggling

Now that the Verizon Droid has been released, lots of blogs and technology sites are comparing it to the iPhone. When I was researching the droid, I found most of these comparisons worthless, as I’ll never use an iPhone as long as Apple’s policies regarding the phone and its app store remain as they are today.

But for the last year I’ve been a very happy T-Mobile G1 user. I love the Android operating system, I love the Google integration, I love the (relative) openness of the device and the near perfect openness of the application market. I cannot imagine using a phone that doesn’t run Andoid any time soon.

Despite loving the software on the G1, I’ve never been completely crazy about the hardware itself. The screen sliding feels a little cheap to me, the phone generally feels a bit sluggish, and the trackball becomes nearly worthless after significant use. Overall, these are minor annoyances, but annoyances nonetheless. The G1 always felt like something of a knockoff iPhone; it was the thing you got when you couldn’t afford a slick, sleek iPhone from Apple. It has features like an iPhone, but generally inferior hardware.

So when I started seeing the Verizon Droid, I got excited. I was eager to switch back to Verizon (I had switched from Verizon to T-Mobile to get the G1 when it first came out) due to Verizon’s superior network coverage and the fact that my wife is a Verizon user. Moreover, the phone looked simply stunning to me. Solid, industrial, sleek, thin (or at least thinner than the G1). Overall, a bad-ass looking phone.

Unsurprisingly, I purchased a Droid the day it was released. In fact, I suffered the early termination fee with T-Mobile in order to get it.

I’ve had the phone for a day now and I wanted to offer some comparisons between it and the G1.

The Good

The hardware of the Droid is solid. It feels heavy and sturdy, sliding the screen to reveal the keyboard differs from the cheap spring of the G1 a great deal (it’s almost, but not quite, difficult to slide). The phone is extremely fast and responsive. Applications start quickly, process quickly, and generally seem speedier. The screen of the Droid is significantly larger than with the G1, and the clarity and resolution of the Droid’s screen are simply stunning. My wife’s contact picture actually looks like her.

The phone is only slightly thinner than the G1, but it makes a huge difference – it feels FAR less bulky in my pocket. The obnoxious upward curve of the bottom of the G1 is gone, replaced by a solid boxy square on the Droid. The front of the phone is devoted almost entirely to the screen. The trackball of the G1 (which becomes less and less responsive over time) has been replaced by a directional pad, and that pad can be accessed only by sliding the keyboard out, devoting even more of the phone to the screen itself.

The power button is in a more convenient place on the Droid as well. Whereas the power/lock button on the G1 was somewhat awkward to use(I always worried about dropping the phone when pressing it to darken the screen before putting it back in my pocket), the Droid’s power/lock button is easy to push and encourages holding the phone in a more solid hand configuration. The volume keys have been moved to the opposing side of the phone, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference either way.

Additionally, the vibration seems a bit stronger on the Droid. I always leave my phone in vibrate mode, but the G1 vibration was pretty weak. Often I’d get a text or a phone call and not even feel it in my pocket. So far, that hasn’t been a problem with the Droid, whose vibration is powerful without being loud. Battery life is far better with the Droid as well – a full day of use with the G1 left the battery dead if I didn’t charge it during the day at least a bit. A full day of use with the Droid doesn’t even get the battery into the yellow, and that’s with the screen significantly brighter.

One feature I particularly like is that the Droid comes with a devoted headphone jack. Listening to podcasts on the G1 was a pain, as it required using an awkwardly long adapter cable plugged into the USB port. This also prevented me from charging the device while listening to something, something I often wanted to do in the car. The Droid has a separate charging port and headphone jack, which is far easier to work with.

Most importantly, the phone connects to Verizon, so I have significantly better 3G coverage than I did with T-Mobile, especially in conference rooms at work (where I need the comfort of Google Reader the most).

The Bad

The Droid isn’t without it’s faults, unfortunately. The Droid keyboard is vastly inferior to the G1’s keyboard. Firstly, there are only 4 rows of keys on the Droid, as opposed to the G1’s five. This means pressing numbers requires using an ‘ALT’ key. Not hugely irritating, but mildly so. Far worse, however, is the fact that the keyboard keys have no gaps between them as they do on the G1, and the buttons themselves are flat rather than being slightly rounded. Typos are far, far more common with the Droid phone, it’s nearly impossible for me to get through a simple text message without fat-fingering something. To make matters worse, because the backspace key is DIRECTLY above the enter key, I find myself accidentally hitting enter when I’m trying to backspace, which means I’m sending a LOT of text messages that end in a typo, only to be followed by another text-message correcting the mistake.

Fuck you, Motorola.

Another irritation is that the Droid does not use a standard USB port. It sure looks a hell of a lot like one, but it isn’t. I could plug the G1 into anything that had a Mini-USB connector on the end. Wall chargers, car chargers, even the cables my wife uses for HER phone (very convenient if I happened to need a quick charge in her car). The Droid uses some proprietary connector, so you have to buy adapters for the thing if you want to charge it. This is completely obnoxious and unnecessary – it’s clearly Motorola trying to suck a little bit more money out of me. The real kick in the balls, however, is what the phone comes with in terms of chargers. It comes with a basic USB connector to connect it to your computer, and a wall adapter FOR THE USB CABLE. If you want to plug it into the wall, you must sacrifice the USB cable. This is particularly obnoxious for me because I had my G1’s usb cable (a standard USB with mini adapter on the end) in my office downstairs, a wall charger in the bedroom so it could charge at night, a wall charger at work so I could charge at work, and a car charger in my car if I needed to make a call but had let my battery die. The Droid’s supplied chargers give me ONE of these at any given moment, and I must separately purchase what I need for the other three.

UPDATE: A commenter has explained that the plug the Droid uses IS, in fact, an open standard, called Micro-B. A quick search on Newegg revealed many cheap Micro-B cables that I could use with the phone. So that’s much less annoying. Still would have bee nice to have a separate wall charger that didn’t use up the one USB cable that comes with the phone, though.

The camera for the Droid is 5 Megapixels. Seems impressive, except that so far I’ve had some pretty crappy luck with it. In fact, the picture of the charger took me five tries to get right, and still came out blurry, even when I switched the focus mode for closeup shots. The flash is basically worthless as well, it never seems to flash at the correct time, and it is effectively a “make this photo blurry” toggle.

Call quality on the Droid seems significantly worse as well. I have not yet determined if the speaker is the problem, but so far it’s much more difficult to hear people during a call on the Droid.

Another annoyance is how close the row of four hardware buttons are to the bottom of the screen on the Droid. I was using Twidroid and reading some private messages on my twitter account, then I hit menu. The only menu item on this screen is for “Delete all messages”. I decided I didn’t want to do that, and hit “back” to exit out of that menu. Unfortunately, the “back” button is flush with the bottom of the screen, so my attempt to go “back” registered on the touchscreen as a click on the menu item, so Twitdroid proceeded to permanently delete all of my private messages. I had to actually rip the battery out of the phone in a panic to interrupt it quickly enough, and I still lost my most recent thirty or so messages. Annoying.

Overall

Many of the nicest features of the Droid are actually features of the Android 2.0 operating system, the next version of the OS running on the G1. It remains unknown at this point if the G1 will get this version of the OS, but it’s what contains most of Droid’s coolest features, such as the turn-by-turn directions and other various improvements to Google Maps. The 2.0 upgrade also comes with a cost: a few of my favorite apps such as “reddit is fun”, “K-9 Mail”, and “Pure Calendar” don’t actually work correctly, but that will likely be fixed in due time.

I also do not yet have the Multimedia Station charger/dock for the Droid, which I think would be awesome on my bedroom nightstand, nor do I have the car mount, both of which I want and I think will make me appreciate the Droid more.

As it stands though, I’m not sure the Droid is compelling enough on its own to warrant the switch from T-Mobile to Verizon. I love the increased coverage, the devoted headphone jack, the screen improvements, and the overall feel of the phone, but I really dislike being nickel-and-dimed on chargers and I kind of really hate the keyboard (I’m hoping I get used to it).