****UPDATE****Droid Versus iPhone Versus Palm Pre

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My daughter's phone is coming up for upgrade and we are on Verizon. There has been "rumors" that the iPhone may come to Verizon. Even so my daughter texts mostly (like 97% of the time as do most teenagers) she has an EnV2 (not touch screen but has a keyboard) are the Droid phones pretty good when compared against the iPhone. She told me she really likes a "real" keyboard so maybe a Droid is what she really wants. Any experience with Droids?
Thanks




MISS NAMEWITHHELD JUST INFORMED ME THAT SHE NOW WANTS TO SERIOUSLY LOOK AT THE PALM PRE PLUS!!!!


HELP? NOW WHAT?
eek.gif
 
I have the original enV. I got it specifically for the full keyboard and I can type really easily and fast. Not sure how different the enV2 is.

My wife just upgraded to the droid and although I love it, I have some trouble with real keyboard. The keys aren't raised or separated (i.e. they are right next to each other and the make a flat continuous surface). I don't have particularly fat fingers but I am a dude. Also, the touch screen keyboard works fine for me but only if I'm real careful and use the wide version (the keyboard changes depending on how you hold the phone).
 
tactile response keyboards (buttons) kick *** on touchscreens period. ESPECIALLY for the super texter.... my daughter.
 
I have an old Samsung Blackjack 2 with real buttons and full keyboard and I rarely make mistakes while replying to e-mail. On my wife's iPod touch I get very frustrated having to backspace and re-type.
 
The virtual keyboard on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) takes a few days of use to get adjusted to, but after that it's fine. It's mostly just adjusting to where you think your finger is going to touch and where it actually touches. Also, using the horizontal keyboard is much more accurate than the vertical keyboard. I rarely make keyboard mistakes anymore.

The major plus to the iPhone is the App Store. It's unbelievable what's available--and tons of very useful apps are free. At least 95% of the apps I use didn't cost a dime.

I've owned plenty of PDAs and smart phones, but nothing comes remotely close to what the iPhone provides in the way of productivity.
 
if texting is driving this decision, then get the cheapest qwerty phone you can. If you want the most amazing "phone" available, get the iphone.
 
Droid is too big and bulky. I hate it and would like to go back to my blackberry since i want to stay on Verizon. I phone is better.
 
I have fat fingers and have had a lot of smartphones/pdas. Currently I have an iPhone (personal) that my fat fingers have adjusted to typing on and htc fuze that has a full keyboard but they aren't raised. In the past I've had Palms, Samsungs, Blackberries, and Motorola smartphones.

My preference for typing is going to be a palm or blackberry keyboards but the iphone after getting used to it is above the rest and as far as the OS it is the best I've had but I haven't tried the google OS.
 
I have an HTC Hero on Sprint (it's an Eris on Verizon)...love it. The virtual keyboard takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it's not so bad, and the algorithm they have that guesses what you really meant to type when you fat finger something is nice. Occasionally, it misinterprets, but it's helpful way more often than it is hurtful...that being said, I will freely admit that I'm not a heave texter.....my ONLY complaint with my phone is that they haven't come out with Scrabble for the droid OS yet....love that game on my stepson's iTouch.
 
Verizon isn't likely to get the iPhone until next year. The AT&T exclusivity does expire this year, however only T-Mobile has a network that is identical to AT&T's. Meaning, there is virtually no cost to adding it to TMO's network. All other networks will require some sort of re-engineering, meaning cost and time factored into the equation.

I don't know what your time frame is, but I wouldn't expect an iPhone on Verizon until 2nd quarter of 2011.
 
The Droid and iPhone are extremely different experiences and designed for completely different people.

First and foremost, the Droid keyboard pretty much sucks, so do not get the Droid for the keyboard. However, your daughter probably has smaller hands/fingers than me, so it won't be as bad for her.

I use an on-screen keyboard called Swype, which is awesome, but only a beta. There are some similar keyboards in the market, SlideIT being one of them. It is pretty good and will let your daughter text pretty fast, but it is very different because you just draw your finger over the letters in the word, you don't actually type or hit the specific letters. Takes 5 minutes to get used to, a couple days to get proficient.

As far as the phones, like I said, they are completely different and really geared towards different people.

The iPhone is an incredibly well designed and engineered phone and has an extremely easy to use interface. They've done a remarkable job. The phone almost always works exactly as it should, its fast, and it is extremely easy to use. My two year old can pick up my wife's iPhone and play games on it with no problem.

To protect that near-perfect user interaction, Apple completely locks down the phone and has strict rules regarding apps. There is very, very little customization, i.e., you can change the lock screen and change a few notifications, but that is about it other than adding apps.

This is great for a large number of people who don't care about having customization options and just want the phone to work flawlessly. It's great for my wife.

I personally hate it. It's boring. Verizon's Droid Does ad campaign is dead on in that the iPhone is very limiting in what it allows you to do.

The Android OS is much more open and flexible. You can change lockscreens, backgrounds, add live wallpapers (with 2.1), add widgets, apply different themes, different icons packs, individual icons, alternative homes ( you can 100% design your own home screens using SweeterHome), custom music players on the screen, tether your laptop to your phone if you aren't near a wireless connection and need to get online, read news feeds, texts, email, twitter from the lockscreen, use quick launch docks, change notification sounds, add music as ringtones, download different keyboards (like SlideIT or Swype), whatever.

It is much more like a computer with a phone. The Droid does a lot more stuff, but with that flexibility, you lose the ease of use factor somewhat, and it isn't as smooth/tight feeling as the iphone. If you keep things basic on the Droid, it works almost as well as the iPhone, but if you have an alternative home with a live wallpaper running 6 different widgets on your home screen, its obviously going to slow things down somewhat. You have to be willing to put up with a few bugs here and there, or maybe it takes a second or two for something to open instead of immediately. Also, apps aren't approved by Google before being released, so you can get terrible apps that affect the performance of the phone - it is important to look at ratings and read the comments.

It really depends on what your daughter wants to use the phone for and how much she wants to be able customize the phone. If she just wants to call and text and doesn't care about changing the background screen, then the iPhone is the way to go. If she wants to be able to customize how the phone looks and operates, then the Droid is a great phone. I love mine.

A couple of pictures showing some customization from a theme I designed/created.

tower.jpg
towerfountain.jpg


tower1.jpg
longhorn1.jpg


However, in no way does my phone work as efficiently as the iPhone. There are times when it lags, when it force closes an app, etc. I put up with these because I like the customization options over the ease of use, but limited nature of the iPhone. Like I said, if set up simply, the Droid operates nearly as well as the iPhone. One last thing to consider is it is very large and heavy compared to the iPhone. The Nexus One (T-Mobile) is closer in size/styling to the iPhone.

I'm happy to answer any specific questions regarding the Droid or the iPhone.
 
Actually the phone works perfectly every time. And with Verizon, it will work in more places.

If you don't put tons of extraneous stuff on the phone and beta test alternative homes, and try out 5 or 10 different widgets, the Droid is faster than the iPhone opening and running the same applications.

I am developing apps for Android, so I have a LOT of stuff on mine, including Sweeter Home, which is a beta program. My phone runs alot slower because I am testing several beta programs, helping to improve those programs so they work better in the future.

Luckily, with the Droid, if you want to customize it you can. That isn't an option with the iPhone. If you want to keep the customization relatively basic, the Droid and Nexus One pretty much outperform the iPhone - although like I said, the user interface isn't quite as slick at this point. I think they will continue to close the gap.

They are made for two different types of people. The iPhone is a great phone. It's just not for everyone.

I've never heard of anyone say that they had problems with a blackberry, though. I'm interested in what sorts of problems you were having with it because I'm considering developing some apps for the blackberry as well.
 
I'm on my 4th Curve 8320, my wife is on her 3rd. We are not rough on the phones and hell I barely leave the house, barely talk on it, and just add a few apps (google and gmail and fandango, that's it) and these things are pieces of total ****. After going through the return process where they sent us DOA refurbished pieces of **** (me twice, wife once) we demanded brand new phones, and those are the current pieces of **** we have.

We have random restarting, the hour-glass forever unless you take the battery out, and the drop-call-to-red-light-reboot, among just general sluggish performance. Today my BBM conversations are reset every time I back out of the program, so that's nice. If I don't get a response to something I send within a few minutes I can't make any sense of a reply I get back. "Ok sure" well, wtf did I ask? who the hell knows b/c my super dooper blackberry can't manage to retain that information. One time I tried Pandora on one of my old ones but that wrecked the thing with the above erros within the week. I tried loading the blackberry apps app and even THAT made my phone run slow. They are just horrible, horrible pieces of trash.

I'm sure many people have been successful with their blackberries, but I've been burned enough with these. The thought that I could have a phone that's simple and works and I don't have to **** with is something I can barely imagine. And it'll play music and video on a better screen? OR I could have a customizable themed background on a POS phone I want to burn in a fire? Hmmmm, tough one.

(Edit: I do like your backgrounds though, and if I had it in me to give another phone besides the Iphone a shot and went with a Droid, I'd probably want them)

I hate you blackberry.
 
I can understand your frustration with the Blackberry not working. Normally that stuff would bother me as well, but since I'm trying to develop Android apps, I've got a lot of stuff on my phone that most people aren't going to have. I put up with the lags/force closes because I'm trying to learn about the phone and what it can do, and what other people are doing with it. I've made a lot of modifications that I knew would slow the phone down and potentially cause certain things not to work perfectly. However, the phone is one of the core systems that you can't mess with (unless you root the phone), so I haven't had any problems with it.

I just thought it was interesting you chose the one undeniable problem with the iPhone, the phone part, to make a point that you just want something that works. If that's what you want, I'd suggest a Nexus One or Droid, and just don't download a lot of apps. There's no doubt that the phone aspect of the Droid is better than iPhone/AT&T.

And the screen on the Droid is better than the iPhone. And you'll be able to listen to music AND run other apps at the same time.

There's a lot of really good things about the iPhone and things it does better than Android/Droid, you just keep choosing the ones that Android/Droid/Verizon does better.

Edit: Thanks on the backgrounds! Unfortunately, Sweeter Home, which I used to create them, is the single biggest issue as far as lag and force closing. If they can ever get it to work properly, it is REALLY badass.
 
Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Back to the OP, who said his daughter likes to text.

The Droid has a physical keyboard which kind of sucks...although it shouldn't be too bad for someone with smaller hands. I wouldn't get the Droid for the physical keyboard unless she tries it out and likes it.

Without Swype, I would say the spacing/ease of use of the onscreen keyboard is better on the iPhone; however, there are numerous alternative keyboards that are better than the stock - I haven't tried them out so I can't say if they are equal to or better than the iPhone.

With Swype, there's really no reason for a physical keyboard or a tap keyboard. It's just that good.

As far as texting, there is the stock messaging program, but I would suggest downloading Handcent. It has a great GUI, and your daughter could customize the notifications so that she can tell from the vibration/ringtone/color of the notification if it is her friends texting her, her parents, teachers, etc. She can change fonts, colors of the bubbles, text colors, attach a signature, change the color of the flashing light, make the light not flash, have it display in the message bar, use a custom background image, etc.

It is a very, very well made app and it integrates flawlessly with the phone. This is the type of customization that can be added without impacting the performance of the phone. And its free.
 
Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Back to the OP, who said his daughter likes to text.

The Droid has a physical keyboard which kind of sucks...although it shouldn't be too bad for someone with smaller hands. She should definitely try it out beforehand though.

Without Swype, I would say the spacing/ease of use of the onscreen keyboard is better on the iPhone; however, there are numerous alternative keyboards that are better than the stock - I haven't tried them out so I can't say if they are equal to or better than the iPhone.

With Swype, there's really no reason for a physical keyboard or a tap keyboard. It's just that good.

As far as texting, there is the stock messaging program, but I would suggest downloading Handcent. It has a great GUI, and your daughter could customize the notifications so that she can tell from the vibration/ringtone/color of the notification, if it is her friends texting her, her parents, teachers, etc. She can change fonts, colors of the bubbles, text colors, attach a signature, change the color of the flashing light, make the light not flash, have it display in the message bar, use a custom background image, etc.

It is a very, very well made app and it integrates flawlessly with the phone. This is the type of customization that can be added without impacting the performance of the phone. And its free.

The Link

There's also Talk, which is the chat feature integrated within Gmail which works extremely well too.

Also, as someone else mentioned above, you can choose haptic feedback (small vibration when you hit the buttons) on the keyboards. I have no idea whether the iPhone does that or not, and my wife already left for work with hers.

The main thing to keep in mind with Android is that for the most part, the apps are relatively new, the developers are still getting used to how to program for it, and there is no approval process similar to Apple's. So, the key is to read reviews, look at the top apps in the market and download those, not the new, experimental ones which don't have a lot of reviews and may not integrate properly or cause the phone to slow down.
 
Mostly I got it because I thought I would be out of the house more often and I wanted robust email capability, even though I don't have a company with blackberry enterprise or anything.

It works fine to grab mail for 3 addresses, but I've had the desktop software abort on me or than a few times so I don't even try to sync contacts anymore. And my emailing needs are modest and I could easily get by with what I already know will be a lesser keyboard in the iphone.

I am sure if you work for a big company who has a blackberry server and you have an IT department to **** with your phone and who doesn't let you load other **** on it anyway and you need to sync contacts and calendar, the BB works fine. I work for myself, check a couple gmail addresses, and want apps that work. I overestimated my emailing needs and my desire to continually mess with a phone, and underestimated my value of simplicity and function.

That being said, my friends who have iphones use theirs for work email and such and couldn't be happier, so I don't feel like that will be a dropoff for my situation at all.
 
Gotcha. My company is small (350-400 people) and we have one IT guy and one webmaster but really I just use the company issued HTC Touch Pro for email and surfing. Hell we don't even have our own server for email.
 
If you do go with an Android phone, I would suggest going with SlideIT as an alternative keyboard until they officially release Swype. It is still amazingly fast compared to tapping - although maybe not as big a difference for your daughter since she's probably much more proficient at texting than I am.

SlideIT does a good job, it just isn't AS good as Swype. It's a free download, so there's nothing to lose by trying it. If I see that the Swype beta opens back up or if they officially release it, I'll post it on this thread.
 
******************UPDATE***********************



MISS NAMEWITHHELD JUST INFORMED ME THAT SHE NOW WANTS TO SERIOUSLY LOOK AT THE PALM PRE PLUS!!!!


HELP? NOW WHAT?
eek.gif
 
Great phone (Palm pre). I have had the Sprint version since it came out last summer and I love it. Great for texting. Good camera. Takes video that can be uploaded to youtube with the push of a button. I like it and they are constantly upgrading it.
 
The Pre Plus is a great phone for a teen. Extremely intuitive, good keyboard, great text application that integrates with chat services like AIM and Gtalk. It has push Gmail and a nice Web browser that very shortly will be Flash-enabled. The only real downside is the small number of thrid-party applications, but all the basics are there like Pandora, Slacker and a nice Facebook application.
 
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