Interesting that most people assumed ATT was bad in some big cities like NYC and SF, but over 26 cities, that really says something. Also note that “voice” was the lowest ranked item for ATT, and data was generally mid-range. This fits what I have seen when using ATT, the data is usually ok, but voice is pathetic, with major call drop issues.

Also note that Verizon ranks #1 for all categories, and was at or near the highest rank possible in most categories. I wonder how bad things would get for ATT if Verizon get an iPhone….

EDIT: see original article.

First, I’ll talk about the phone, and then (of course) the obligatory comparison to Apples phone.

I moved to Droid from T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3g, so I was already very familiar with Android and its pros and cons. Droid comes with Android 2.0, and there are a lot of great new features. The look and feel are a bit different, and things are smoother overall. A couple of highlights:

– Contacts now sync with Facebook, this was pretty cool. Any contact that it could find in my Facebook account would be linked, and their facebook photo is set as their contact photo. Also, anytime I do anything with a linked contact, like open an SMS thread, etc, their FB status is displayed by their pic.

– New contact pop-up short cuts. In you are looking at your contact list and click a contacts photo, a little slider pops up with shortcuts to FB, SMS, Email, etc.

– New “Corporate Calendar” that finally lets you sync your Exchange calendar to the device. This is so great, totally needed as well.

– You can now have MULTIPLE ActiveSync accounts in a unified inbox!

On to the hardware. Droid isn’t going to win any beauty contests, and if an iPhone was a Ferrari, this would be a Ford F-150. Functional and not ugly, but very boxy. This boxiness makes the phone look bigger than it is. In fact it’s almost exactly the size of an iphone, and only slightly longer than my MyTouch 3G. Its a heavy phone and feels very solid. Most of the phone is glass and metal, so that is nice. The gold accents I could do without, I think silver would have been better. But its not horrid.

The camera is very good, and the flash works well. Video recording is pretty amazing and the playback looks awesome.

That awesomeness can be directly attributed to the totally gorgeous screen. It really is jaw dropping. Everything from icons to text look smooth and perfectly rendered. Photos look great, and given the pixel count, viewing large webpages is much better than any other phone I’ve used.

Battery life seems to be pretty good as well. Not quite as good as the MyTouch, but better than the 3GS. I have Bluetooth and GPS on all the time, as well as syncing facebook, gmail, exchange. Today I sent 75+ sms messages, ~30min talk time, several emails, took a few pictures, and used the GoogleNav for about 30min. My batt lasted from 930am to just after midnight (and that was the 20% warning). So quite good. Nav uses a lot of batt as the screen is always on, GPS is continuous, and the app is constantly calculating your location and updating a map. I have a car adapter and I think I would always use that when navigating to keep the batt useage at bay.

So lets get to the comparison. Droid has 4 killer features that the iPhone (or Pre) can’t match – Verizon, Google Nav, high res screen, google voice input.

Lets face it, ATT’s network looks like a child with tinker toys built it compared to Verizon. I have consistent 3G coverage literally everywhere, inside, outside, driving, etc. Places that ATT always dropped calls I have no problems keeping a call up. 3G speeds are very fast and always reliable. I no longer live in fear of going from 5 bars to nothing on a random whim (see my previous ATT postings).

GoogleNav is pure awesome. Other nav companies should be very afraid. Directions are very accurate, the on screen display of the route is excellent, and the animations are good. The huge plus is that it links right into google maps, so you can get all sorts of other information along your route. And with traffic, you can know when to tell the system to re-route you. Oh, and every turn can be viewed in street view with the route overlaid. And its free, wow. Granted iPhone may get this as well, so it might not be a killer app for too long.

The screen is amazing. At almost 3 times the resolution, but about the same size as the iphone, it easily wins here. Apple needs to get a hi rez iphone goings soon.

Google voice input is very very handy. Click the icon and say anything, from “navigate to starbucks” or “how much does an african swallow weigh” and google will find it. Using the “navigate” keyword will cause the phone to start GoogleNav and route you to the local. It even worked perfectly with a street address, or something more vague like “Navigate to Old Chicago Restaurant”. Oh, and you can do voice activated dialing of course. The only thing I can think of that should be done is to add voice to text to email or sms text inputs so you could speak and then send.

Of course there are some problems too. IPhone still has the better on screen keyboard, although Droid’s is better than previous android phones.

The quality of the apps are no up to the same par as Apple (yet). I think given the number of new android phones coming to market this will change, but so far its just not as good.

The IM apps for Android aren’t quite as pretty as iPhone, there is still nothing asl slick as Bejive.

The other features of Android that I find better than iPhone are the same as before… so my previous postings still hold true.

So, I am very happy with this phone. Verizon is just so nice, and given the screen res and google nav, I can’t see how I could go to an iPhone every again. iPhone wins on music/itunes, and a more consistent (but simpler) OS flow. But Droid seems like a real phone to accomplish things – nav, lots of email accounts, great sms, etc. The iPhone feels like a game box with a “phone” built in. This is a huge step for Android, and Verizon.

The big features of the 3.0 software that everyone is talking about are:

– Copy/Paste
I have this on Android, and most other smart phones do this. Pure catch up

– Landscape keyboard
Really? Only just now getting this?

– Type new messages while the old is still sending
This is a feature? I can do this on Android, or better yet, type a message, send it, go do something else, and still have my streaming music player open in the background.

– Spotlight search
This is very cool, and a nice addition

– YouTube video upload
Android, Pre, etc can do this already.

– Turn by Turn nav
Nice, but Pre had it out of the box, most all Verizon phones have this as well.

– MMS*
Welcome to the 21st century iPhone! Oh wait ATT still doesnt support this…

– Notifications
Nifty I guess, but my Android phone notifies me all the time, and Androids notification system is far better. More on this later

And the new 3GS hardware itself has some new toys:

– Compass
Ok, I have this on Android and I rarely use it, I wouldnt switch phones for this

– Video recording
Again, this is not new and somethign that should have been there a long time ago.

– Tethering
ATT is killing this, so no point in upgrading for it. T-Mobile wont let Android either. VZ lets you, and its pretty fast too.

– Voice control
Could be interesting, I would have to see how it actaully works in practice. I can do voice google searches already on my Android, but I rarely use it.

– Better battery
This would be by far the best part of the new HW. If the batt is much better a lot of people will be happy.

– Faster processor. This is the new Cortex chip, so should be a nice speed improvement. But the Pre has this chip too… and the Toshiba G01 has a Snapdragon that will toast anything else… so not a wild technology leap, but still a good upgrade.

Notifications were one of the biggest things hyped about the new 3.0 software. This is Apples answer to the cries for multitasking. But this still won’t matter. For example, say I have a notifications enabled IM app, and then I go off and open Pandora and listen to some tunes. I get an IM and I get “notified” however that happens to look on the phone’s UI. If I switch to the IM app, I still have to kill pandora and my music goes away.

Now, lets look at this scenario on Android. I’m playing music on fast.fm. I get an IM on gChat. It pops up in the notifications area and I can simple slide the notifcations bar down, read the message and be done. Or, I can click on it and gChat opens and I can respond. And guess what? My streaming music is still playing!

In the end, I this won’t stop the complaints about no multitaksing, it will just finally make some things actually work ok on the phone – IM clients and the like.

So for me, while I love the physical design of the phone, and the interface is so nice and polished, I just don’t see how I could upgrade and lose out on things I do the most – IM and txting, and being able to do those things while I have whatever else I want running at the same time. Oh ya, and ATT still has a sucky network…

A few interesting points about this. The storage capacity is the base amount (or with the Pre the only amount). The G1 looks bad, but then again, it has a micro SD slot so you can put whatever you want in there.

Battery life for the G1 looks bad as well, but this is very different from other data (see last post) where standby was over 300hrs. However, as a G1 owner, I can say that standby time is not stellar, and I don’t think its really 300hrs.

Voice commands are interesting. The new Android 1.5 software has Google voice search. Which is interesting I guess, but most of the time I’m using my cell, its not ideal conditions for voice commands.

The app store should have listed an approximate number of apps available. Obvious the Apple App Store is the huge winner. Android Market isn’t bad, several thousand apps now. The Palm Catalog is new and has less than 20 apps, but we should give it a few months before passing judgement.

Multitasking is slightly misleading on the iPhone 3GS. The new 3.0 software has “notifications” so things like IM can “run” in the background. Or at least you could stay logged in and be notified when a new message comes in. Of course this isn’t real multitasking. And there is no way (that I have seen) to let 3rd party apps hook various system features. Android is great at this.

Finally, the thing that hurts the iPhone most in this chart is the service plan. ATT is more expensive than plans from T-Mobile or Sprint. I shopped plans myself, and I do a lot of txting and data, but don’t need a lot of minutes. Sprint ended up being cheapest – about $55 a month plus their free night minutes start at 7pm! T-mobile (my current carrier) was next cheapest at about $70. The win with them is the “My Favs”. I get unlimited calling any time to any three numbers. I use the Phonalyzr app to keep track of who most of my minutes go to, and set them as my favs. I have never gone over my minutes. ATT is fairly expensive by comparison. $20 extra just for unlimited messaging! My $25 unlimited data plan from T-Mobile includes unlimited SMS and MMS.

Bottom line from this graphic is the iPhone still has the edge in a apps and storage. But carrier selection hurts and still no true multitasking is a bummer. However, if the notifications service works well, that might be good enough for most people.