iPhone vs. Droid
I put the ever-popular iPhone against the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Incredible.
The comparison is really between the Motorola Droid and the HTC Incredible; the phones I'm looking at getting when my contract runs up with Verizon next month. I included it though to provide some contrast.
Note that these lists are more about unique hardware features that make them stand out (either negatively or positively).
Motorola Droid
It's not the first Droid phone on Verizon, but it has a few things that make it stand out from the rest of the smartphones.
The big one being the physical slide-out keyboard. Many have said the keyboard isn't that great, and maybe it isn't. But it still has advantages over on-screen keyboards: it doesn't take up valuable screen space, and you can see it if the screen is being washed out by sunlight.
The battery on the Droid seems to be pretty close to on-par to what you expect from a do-everything smartphone these days: a little over a day of "normal" use. Of course, this is always something hard to define. However most people seem to find the Droid battery tolerable at 270hr standby time.
HTC Droid Incredible
Yes, the full proper name is "Droid Incredible". This phone does a lot to make itself stand out from the pack, but does it do too much?
FM Tuner seems like a trivial feature, but I've found it to be very handy on my current phone. It's battery friendly and doesn't require you to remember to load up the latest songs before you head out for the day.
The SenseUI exclusive to HTC devices seems to get a lot of praise for polishing up some features of Droid. This apparently includes some touch-ups for the on-screen keyboard that make it very usable.
The Motorola Droid comes with a 16gb microSD card, and a very small amount of built-in memory. This can be a hassle if you install a lot of apps that require they be installed locally to the device. The Incredible removes this problem with 6gb of on-board memory. No microSD card comes with it though. This should be OK for most people, as they probably already have a card from their old phone (what phone doesn't support microSD these days?). The breathing room is welcome.
The processor on this phone is one of the fastest you'll find in a phone. This makes the phone very snappy and responsive, but at what cost?
You CAN tether other phones from Verizon to your computer to use as a modem, but you're not supposed to without the extra data plan. This phone has Verizon's blessing to let you do that without any tricks.
So, this phone is only rated at 144hrs standby time, which is almost half of what the Droid can do. This could be the Achilles heel of this phone, but at least you can buy a spare or extended life battery, right?
A physical keyboard would be really nice, but if the on-screen keyboard is as nice as some say it is, this could be a non-issue.
iPhone
There isn't really a whole lot that can be said here. It does have a powerful backing of applications, but Android is very quickly growing, and is much more developer friendly.
Are aesthetics really worth depriving the phone of very simple things like a battery and expandable memory? They may seem like trivial "features", and I've never had to replace a battery in my phone, but I'm glad the option is there.
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May 10, 2010