This is not the 'droid you are looking for

[krizoitz]

There has been a lot hype about Verizon's new Android phone, cleverly named Droid. Reviews have been mostly positive overall, but I find myself wondering: What does it offer the consumer that the iPhone does not allready offer (in many cases in a more polished form?) The answer I have come away with is, not a whole lot. Touted features like open

Comments

[msondo]

The reasons I'm curious about the device: mechanical keyboard, no itunes, downloading apps outside of an app store, and the potential to support business models that Apple hates (Real is working on a version of Rhapsody for this device.) Full Rhapsody support alone would make me go out and buy the thing this second. Real did port over their streaming Rhapsody player for the iphone, which is nice, but requires an internet connection. I would have likely purchased an iPhone years ago, but I really hate iTunes.

[krizoitz]

From the verious reviews i've read, the mechanical keyboard on this is crap, thats the biggest knock on it actually. In order to make the device as thin as they did, the keyboard keys are flat and have very shallow click to them. There is also the issue of being slightly offset because of the direction pad thingie. I can't speak to this on experience having seen one, but the Gizmodo and Engadget reviews both brougth this up as a complaint.

I'm not sure I have asked you this before, but what in particular do you dislike about iTunes?

[msondo]

Hmm, that would definitely turn me off. I liked the keyboard on the G1. My fingers are fat and clumsy so I can't do the touchscreen type thing

[krizoitz]

I've never had a problem with perf, but then again I have an order of magnitude further songs

[krizoitz]

Really? I love the absence of flash and its bloated, poor performing, inaccesible nature. I have not found a single flash site that I need to go to or miss. Heck on my iPhone ESPN.com doesn't crash like it does on the desktop, nor do I get stuck with auto playing videos.

Plus with the tag in HTML5 and more sites encoding video in H.264 video in Flash is vanishing too.

The real internet is based on openness and standards, Flash is closed and proprietary, so no I don't consider it a legitimate part of the real internet.

On top of that Adobe can't write a decent Flash player for Mac OS X, why should we trust them to get it right on the iPhone OS, a device with less resources and performance than a full pc?

[krizoitz]

And there are still places that publish information in Microsoft .pub files, doesn't mean we should keep supporting them.