Review: Why I’m Keeping the Droid… for now.

It’s so hard to say goodbye… to my iPhone.

The Droid by Motorola is trying to make the process as painless as possible though.  I’ll dispense with the unpleasantries first.  The first thing that people need to know about the Droid is that it is absolutely not an iPhone killer.

Yes, that’s right.  I know everyone was touting the Droid as an iPhone killer pre-launch, but I’m pretty sure that was just part of the pre-launch hysteria.

The iPhone is a magnificent device that mixes an iPod, a phone and the internet together.  (At least Steve Jobs says so.)  Unfortunately, in Gotham, the iPhone is reduced to being an iPod that has pretty applications that always work… when you’re on Wi-Fi.  If you’re trying to use the iPhone as a phone or access the internet, you’re SOL.  In my apartment, I sometimes have to place a call four times before a single instance goes through to my intended recipient.  What’s much more infuriating is that, oftentimes, I’ll receive a call and AT&T will drop the call the minute I hit “Answer.”  Why show me the call at all?  Actually, now that I have Google Voice, sometimes I see calls that were made to my Google Voice number that never make it to my phone at all.  (To be fair, this could be either Google Voice’s or AT&T’s fault…)

The Droid, on the other hand, is a magnificent device that mixes a phone, the internet and a music player together – in that order.  The phone is incredible.  Well, again, to be fair, I think my standards of incredible have been lowered to “works in my apartment.”  Nonetheless, the Verizon network does service to its reputation as the most reliable network in the country.  The applications are, for the most part, fairly good.  The selection is less robust when compared with the amount of applications on the iPhone platform, but I’m hardly hurting for good applications in the Android Marketplace.  Where the phone is supposed to fall flat is the music player, but even that’s not awful to use.  Sure, it’s not as pretty as the iPhone, but when I play music, I listen to it… I’m not playing with the interface.

So then… why am I not jumping ship completely to the Droid?  Well, the problem for me is the syncing.  If you’ve ever met me, you know that I’m quite the Apple fan boy.  I count among my Apple history the passing through of four Apple computers (Powerbook, MacBook, iMac, MacBook Pro), six various different types of iPods (including the iPhone), an Apple Cinema Display, an Apple TV (for s short period of time) and four different Apple-branded networking devices.

I need my phone to import my music (mostly iTunes Plus and non-DRM’d), my podcasts and my photos.  There are no applications released directly from Motorola or Verizon to get information off my Mac and onto my Droid.  I dredged up two options.  The first is DoubleTwist (free).  It’s less of syncing application than an iTunes alternative.  In order to keep my stuff updated, I’d have to manually move my songs over to the device.  Um, no.  Dealbreaker.  My other option was Salling Media Sync ($22), which worked a lot more like how iTunes works with my iPhone.  The free version of Salling Media Sync would allow for syncing but would take forever because it erased and then synced everything on your phone over again.  Semi-dealbreaker, but hey… free.  The only problem is that… it freezes on me.  I just can’t figure out why.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Hopefully, it will be fixed soon.

Despite all this, I know the Droid has incredible potential. It handles notifications better than the iPhone because it can handle multiple notifications at once using its drop down menu.  It integrates with my Google Voice, Google Calendar, Gmail and even my Google Finance portfolios.  It’s a little more complicated to operate than the iPhone, but a lot of the applications actually work much better than their iPhone counterparts.  (Facebook is a notable exception to this — they need to fix this asap.)

I’ll see how I feel about the Droid in two or three more weeks before I make a final decision.

Filed under: general