I’ve been an Apple guy all my life. I like Apple products because Apple puts an emphasis on making things “just work”. Oh sure, nothing is perfect, but they score higher on the success chart than anyone else. Human-computer interaction is a primary thought, not an afterthought, and it shows in the design of both their OS and their hardware. Apple leads, everyone else follows.
While I love my iPhone, I can’t help but be curious about Android. This past Sunday at a dinner, a gentleman sitting next to me had a Motorola Droid X phone. I asked him about it, he let me play with it.
Gosh, but I’m impressed.
I liked that you could put a storage card in there, to facilitate transfers between your phone and other devices. Not sure how smooth and seemless it is, but gosh that’s nice.
Decent camera with a flash. Seems like a simple request, but my iPhone 3GS’s camera isn’t that great.
Overall response of the system and network was peppy. Never felt like anything was dragging.
I loved the huge screen size. Of course, that meant a larger device and it’s certainly pushing the limits of a “pocket device”. But I think what I also dug was the use of that limited space. For instance, menus weren’t constantly along the bottom of the screen but only came up on-demand by pressing one of the 4 buttons on the front of the device. I like that because precious screen space is now filled with content, not menu. It doesn’t always matter of course, but I just like the concept of being able to use limited resources to the fullest.
I liked that the main screens aren’t just flipping through pages of app icons, but instead you can have some vital things running so you can quickly access information you care about, like sports scores or today’s calendar of appointments, or whatever.
I only got to play with the device for a short while, so my impressions are shallow. There were some things I didn’t think it did as well as the iPhone, but it’s subtle little human-computer interaction details, too difficult to articulate in the limited space I have here. Still, I left with an overall positive impression and certainly am curious to explore it more.
Stuff From Hsoi 
I have an EVO and love it. One app is a must and that is Advanced Task Killer. This is simply due to many apps running in the background and not really shutting down.
If you want to come by and play with it for a while, let me know. I have a binder you may want to recollect, as well. 🙂
Yeah, one of these days I’ll get over there. *sigh*
My husband has that exact same Droid, and we both love it, and thats coming from someone who swore they’d NEVER get a smart phone….I think I’ve changed my mind! Very easy to use, very comfortable to use, I might just be getting one next time I can upgrade my phone!
Wife had a similar experience with the iPhone. Swore she’d never, but now she couldn’t live without it.
Daughter #1 just got an Evo yesterday. She was like a kid at Christmas. After 24 hours she’s still loving it. Optimizing settings for battery usage is a must though. I have absolutely agonized over getting either the Evo or an iPhone. Had Apple released the iPhone to all vendors it probably wouldn’t have been an issue. Funny, they have had that very same problem before! Cough… IBM…Cough, cough…Microsoft
Battery life is one of the biggest and toughest battles to overcome. We’re going to need some sort of revolution in “portable power” to really take mobile computing to the next level.