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My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week’s iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I’ve got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it all seems to indicate one thing: people want more. We hear you.

There are a number of worthwhile topics I simply didn’t get a chance to touch on, and a few observations I’ve made since that are worth mentioning. For those, may we present: Round 2.

 

Before we start, I should say: these aren’t all details everyone will care about, by any means. Some of them are quite important; others are downright nitpicky. I highly recommend that you read Round 1 before you read this – it covers many of the major topics, from aesthetics and keyboards to browsers and user interfaces. Also — and I might regret saying this later — feel free to use the comments section down below to ask any lingering questions you may have. I don’t have nearly enough time to test every last minutia – but if you’re curious and I’m able, I’ll add a bit to the post about it.

Foreword: While we are expanding upon the things mentioned in Round 1, the overall conclusion remains the same. To summarize where we left off last time: both the iPhone and the Droid are absolutely incredible for their own reasons, and both have far too many merits for one to truly “defeat” the other. How happy you are with either depends largely on who you are.

With that said, lets begin.

Screens, Part 2 – the Sunlight Test:

As stated in Round 1, the Droid screen demolishes anything we’ve seen in a US smartphone to date – including the iPhone. While the iPhone’s 3.5″, 480×320 will more than satisfy anyone but the pickiest gadgeteers, the Droid’s 3.7″ 854×480 screen is, to resort to an incredibly cheesy cliche, a thing of beauty.

However, there is one place it falls very, very short: under direct sunlight. It is not alone in this, however – the iPhone, too, fails this test miserably. Both handsets essentially go blank under direct sunlight, even with the backlight cranked all the way up. I’m about as suntanned as Casper’s backside in the middle of winter, so it’s not too big of a deal for me – but for anyone who does, you know, go outside, know that you’ll probably need to turn in such a way so as to shade your handset just to make it usable when the sun’s on high.

Winner: Neither.

Ringer Volumes:

I always carry my phone in my pants pocket and rely primarily on the vibration to alert my concert-deafened ears of incoming calls. After Round 1, we got lots and lots of requests from people who carry their handset in purses/backpacks, and thus rely on it’s ability to sing.

To be completely candid: We do not have a scientific way of testing this. To be completely candid for 99% of other gadget blogs, neither do they. Our completely unscientific test involved putting each handset exactly 5 feet from a microphone with the speaker in roughly the same place, recording their default ringtones into Audacity, and then comparing overall loudness. I also tested it by putting it in a backpack and pretending my ears were sensitive enough to unquestionably decide.

Winner: Droid, in both tests. Its default ring appears to be about at least 30% louder at its peaks than any of the iPhone ringtones we tried, and it was audibly louder in my bag.

Camera:

We weren’t ready to make a final decision with the Droid camera in Round 1, considering that we’d only taken a handful of pictures. We’ve taken a bunch more since, and our final verdict: it’s average at its best, and terrible at worst.

Droid photos are on the left, with iPhone 3GS photos on the right:

The main issue is with the auto-focusing system, primarily because it just doesn’t work. More times than I care to count, I’ve seen the Droid auto-focus, lock on as clear as day for about half a second, and then immediately blur. This happens at short range, at long range, at medium range.. it’s just really, really bad at focusing. This can presumably be fixed in a software update, so all hope is not lost.

The one strength the Droid has over the iPhone in the camera department is its flash – but it’s probably not all you’d hoped for. It’ll up the quality of your drunken bar shots a bit, but the vignette effect caused by the LED flash is almost unbearable for anything else.

Android 2.0’s camera user interface is a bit more messy than the iPhones, but it also offers up considerably more: flash settings, white balance, color effects, etc. They tucked all that stuff into a slide out drawer that .. doesn’t like to slide. Pro-tip: Tap the drawer, don’t slide it. It’ll work a bit better.

Winner: The iPhone, if only because it focuses when I ask it to.

Video Quality:

I shot the same video on both phones whilst holding the two phones as closely together as I could without blocking either phones lens.

Droid:

iPhone:

How is it as a phone?:

There are a number of points to touch on on this matter, so we’ll break it down thusly:

• Call Quality: We got a surprising number of questions about this. Turns out, people wanted to know how well this phone served as, you know, a phone. We’ll keep this one simple: The Droid, in combination with Verizon’s network, is an absolutely shining example of how call quality should be. Both the earpiece and the speakerphone go all the way up to 11 without fidelity failures.

  To compare sound quality, we called a handful of people back-to-back. The Droid’s incoming sound quality was noticeably better in each call, to the point that we thought we were doing something wrong. I switched locations and tried again on a different iPhone (note: a 3G, rather than a 3GS) – same story. The Droid’s incoming call quality is simply superb.

  The difference in outgoing sound quality wasn’t nearly as clear cut. One of our callers thought we’d just called back on the same phone. Four of the five callers thought we sounded better on the Droid when we were in a semi-loud environment (by that, we mean a crowded coffee shop – not a construction site), but only one felt they noticed a difference when we were in a more standard environment.

  Winner: Droid, because it completely floors the iPhone on incoming voice quality.

• Visual Voicemail: We hate, hate, hate the traditional voice mail system around these parts, so Visual Voicemail is a plus. The iPhone does it out of the box – the Droid doesn’t. You can pay Verizon $2.99 a month for the feature — which is a crock of nonsense — or use Google Voice, for free. I’ll probably have to argue with my TechCrunch colleagues about this for the rest of the night, but Google Voice isn’t enough. It’s a great alternative, but it’s just that: an alternative. At this point, the Droid (and all smartphones) should do this, for free, out of the box.

  Winner: iPhone.

• Phone Interface: The phone interfaces on both are very, very similar. You’ve got the Keypad/Phone, Call Logs/Recent, Contacts, and Favorites on both, and the aforementioned Visual Voicemail on the iPhone (which we won’t count against the Droid here, as we counted it separately above). These interfaces are so damned similar, we were just about to tie it, but…

  Winner: Droid. The default contacts system on the Android 2.0 is outstanding. It pulls everything from Facebook, constantly syncs profile photos to contacts, and shows Google Chat online status. It’s polish, but it’s polish we appreciate.

• Carrier Signal: I live in an interesting area of California when it comes to testing phones. We’re mostly blanketed in 3G on both AT&T and Verizon, but we don’t have a big enough population that it ever strains either network. I don’t see the same dropped call rate my iPhone-carrying colleagues in the Bay Area and New York see – in fact, I rarely drop a call. However, I do regularly see my iPhone’s signal go from full to empty in distances of a few feet. At the top of my entryway, for example, I’ve got full 3G and can make a call – if I take two steps down, I lose everything (including EDGE) and calls fail immediately.

  I’ve only been testing Verizon’s network for a week now while I’ve been on AT&T for two years, so to directly compare my experiences would be unfair. I can say, however, that I’ve yet to find any dead zones — and trust me, I’ve looked — and the spots where my iPhone fails, the Droid has no problem. It’s two entirely different networks (and radio technologies), so this is to be expected – but I must say that, at least for little nook of Central California, I’m mighty impressed by the coverage. Winner: Unable to fairly determine; while the Droid hasn’t shown any faults yet, it’s going up against 2 years of AT&T experience.

• Multi-tasking while talking on the phone: Background processing is one of Android’s much touted strengths, but in the case of the Verizon Droid (or any other CDMA phone), it has one fault: you can’t make a call and use the data connection at the same time. On a call with your sweet one and need to look up the address of the restaurant you’re meeting at tonight? If you’ve got a WiFi connection, you’re golden – but if you’re relying on 3G, you’ll get a big ol’ error alert. It’s not an issue that comes up for me a whole lot, but it’s something we hear VZW customers rant about on the regular.

  However, it’s worth nothing: if WiFi is available, Droid is definitely the superior multi-tasker. Even if you don’t have a need to pop into a specific app, being able to check all of your incoming notifications at a glance is incredibly helpful.

  Winner: If WiFi isn’t available, iPhone. If it is, Droid.
  

Start-up time:

We got more than a few e-mails about this, so for good ol’ comparison’s sake:

• iPhone 3GS: 30.2 seconds
• Motorola DROID: 38.6 seconds.

This was measured by recording both on video, starting each phone from a completely powered down state, and then determining the time based off the videos. Both handsets have e-mail configured, a few dozen apps, and plenty of usage on them.

Winner: iPhone, by a bit over 8 seconds.

Notifications:

Background notifications are like a godsend for iPhone users and developers alike – but it’s still a tacked on solution. Apple didn’t really go about developing the iPhone OS with the idea that such things would be necessary, and so the solution isn’t optimal. You get a maximum of one at a time, and they’re fired at you like a baseball to the crotch in an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

I absolutely prefer the Android notification system. They’re thrown into a slide-out drawer rather than into your face, and can be pulled out, viewed, and cleared at almost any time. This also lets them throw in reminders, such as Birthday alerts (pulled from Contacts/Facebook) and calendar items.

Android is also the only one of the two that allows you to turn off notifications without diving into the settings, via the fourth icon on the “Power Control” homescreen widget. When you’ve got 5+ apps constantly firing off bleepy-bloopy noises, being able to stifle them with a single click as opposed to four or five is a nice – if very small – touch.

With all that said, Android’s system notification may be a bit much for the lay user. We’re not trying to underestimate the lay user here, but additional layers of complexity tend to.. well, complicate things. If I handed this phone to my mom and asked her to “slide out the notification drawer and check for new emails”, she’d probably respond with “So wait, I open my Google?” It’s no sweat for even a fledgling geek, but it might bewilder anyone who’s new to the smartphone scene for a day or two.

Winner: Android/Droid. Its notification system is a bit more complicated, but far more capable.

The Smudge Test:

Here’s one you don’t see in reviews very often, but it’s important if you actually plan on using the phone. Any phone can be gorgeous when it comes out of the box – but carry it around in your lint-filled, sandy pockets for a few hours, and it’ll look like its seen wars.

I’m not exactly a dirty person. I wash behind my ears and, outside of the days where I get to stay at home in my pajamas, tend to dress well enough. I ..can.. not.. keep my iPhone clean. Specifically the backside. After I lug it around for a full day, it comes back looking like it spent the afternoon in someone’s mouth. It’s inexplicably gunky and covered in fingerprints, to the extent that I’m convinced someone is stealing my iPhone and putting crap all over it. The Droid’s admittedly less exciting matte backside does a far better job of keeping prim and proper, in that I’d gladly hand it to someone without having to rub it across my pant leg first.

The tables turn slightly when you start talking about the front side, though. While the Droid screen does just as good as the iPhone 3GS’ much touted oleophobic screen (in fact, we think the Droid screen might have an oleophobic coating as well), there is a gap around the edge of the screen that is juuuust big enough to pick up random particles of whatever crap you have in your pocket, but not big enough (as with the iPhone) that most of it falls right out.

Winner: Tie. The Droid does a better job of keeping its backside clean, but the iPhone tends to have a neater face.

Media playback:

Considering that Apple spent six years making the iPod prior to launching the iPhone, it’s no surprise that the iPhone’s iPod functionality is damn near flawless. The UI is drop dead simple, and it’s about as pretty as things get before things start getting extraneous. The Android Media player is none of those.

The Droid music playback interface is all over the place, and the design is a sea of black. It’s not unusable by any means, but it lacks any real sign of polish or grace.

The Droid video playback interface.. doesn’t exist. Even in Android 2.0, Android lacks out-of-the-box video support. You can download video apps from the Market, but we’ve yet to find one – be it free or paid – that is really up to snuff. We’d recommend the free Video Player app over anything we’ve seen so far; the interface is very bare bones, but it’ll play 3GPP and H264 videos.

The Winner: iPhone.

App Storage:

Google made a fairly huge mistake in the design of Android, and they haven’t fixed it with Android 2.0. You see, the Droid only has 512 MB of internal memory. This is made okay by the fact that it supports microSD cards up to 32GB, and comes with a 16GB card. But here’s the catch: you can’t use that microSD card for app storage. In fact, you can’t even use all of the 512 MB of internal memory for app storage – you’re limited to 256 MB.

Many Android applications are just 500 KB to 3 Megabytes, so you can squeeze dozens of them into memory without any issue – but that doesn’t mean everything is okay. On the iPhone, applications have free reign over whatever storage space is available on the internal hard drive, opening the door for rich 3d textures and high-fidelity voice/sound files. As a result, many iPhone applications are in the 40-50 megabyte range, with some (such as Myst, or Secret of Monkey Island) reaching up into the hundreds of megabytes.

There is one solution: developers can make the application they host on the marketplace only a few megabytes large, and then have the application download the rest of its media onto the SD card after installation. From a user experience standpoint, however, this is a fairly terrible solution – once you’ve downloaded and installed, it’s time to play.

Google needs to fix this as soon as possible, or its applications will be forever stunted. You can argue that mobile applications shouldn’t need to be hundreds of megabytes large, but I won’t be able to hear you over the awesome voice acting in Monkey Island.

(Note: I am well aware that you can save apps to microSD if you root the Android device. We didn’t count jailbreak-only stuff in Round 1, so we definitely won’t count root-only stuff in Round 2)

Winner: iPhone

Conclusion:

I stand by our original conclusion from Round 1 – heres the important bit:

With Android 2.0, we’ve come to a very difficult crossroad. No longer can we recommend one handset over the other simply by its feature set. At this point, it’s all about the person who will be carrying it. For you, dearest TechCrunch Network reader: Yes, I’d probably recommend the Droid over an iPhone. Would I recommend it for your mother, father, or little sister? Nope. If you want a phone that just works and does damned near everything you could want and don’t mind Apple’s closed garden: by all means, get the iPhone. If you can handle a bit of complexity for the sake of flexibility and don’t mind having to tinker a bit: by all means, get the Droid. At this point, I honestly feel that either choice would make any sane person incredibly happy.

If hype were to be believed, the Motorola DROID is the pièce de résistance of the mobile world; the conclusive creation sent down by the Great Smartphone in the sky to rid us of our woes. It would prepare your breakfast promptly each morning, tuck you in at night, and, maybe — just maybe — knock the iPhone down a notch or two.

Beginning about a week before its launch (largely due to Verizon’s incredibly intense marketing campaign) I began getting calls and tweets from friends and colleagues asking about the Droid. They always had two questions: the first would be something like “What do you think of the Droid?”, followed by “Would you recommend it over the iPhone?” Same questions, each.. and.. every.. time.

I’ve been using the Droid as my primary phone for a few days now, and I think I’m finally ready to answer them.

 

A bit about the reviewer:

Being that I’m only human, it is absolutely impossible for me to be 100% objective when comparing two phones. Thus, my only option is to be as transparent as possible. Going into this review, I had used an iPhone (which, for disclosures sake, I pay for in full) as my primary device for around 2 years. I also regularly use a Palm Pre, Nokia N97, BlackBerry Tour, T-Mobile G1, and an HTC Touch2 to ensure a general knowledge of all the major platforms. I am an iPhone developer by hobby. This Droid unit was provided by Motorola for review.

The Looks:

Comparing the aesthetics of the iPhone and the Droid is.. ludicrous, if not impossible. It’d be like having a heated argument over whether Angelina Jolie was more or less gorgeous than Halle Berry. Each is stunning for their own reasons. Same deal here; the iPhone is engulfed in glistening curves that give it a softer, friendlier look, while the Droid is wrapped in tight, clean angles that make it a shining example of great industrial design.

If we were to consider the overall designs par-for-par, all we’d have left to nitpick is the details. In the Droid’s case, the gold details on the camera button, 5-way D-Pad, and rear casing lose it some points for looking like something straight out of a bad 70’s bachelor pad. The iPhone then loses its ground for the fact that the glossy back casing is damned near impossible to keep clean and free of fingerprints.

The Winner: It’s a tie. Both are drop dead gorgeous, and the only flaws of each are downright trivial.

On-Screen Keyboards:

In preparation for the onslaught of candybar Touchscreens that were sure to follow after the success of the iPhone, Android earned on-screen keyboard support shortly after the launch of the G1. At first, it.. well, it sucked. A lot.

It has gotten better since, however – on the stock build of Android 2.0 I’ve got running on this Droid, I’m able to blast about at nearly the same rate as I can on my iPhone. That’s impressive for Android’s sake, considering that I’ve spent considerably more time on the iPhone keyboard.

That said, the iPhone’s autocorrect seems a bit better at properly attending to my typos, primarily on shorter words that have more potential alternatives.

The Winner: iPhone, by a very slim margin. It just does a better job at guessing what I’m trying to type as I poke my way around a sea of glass. That said..

Physical Keyboard:

For many, a physical keyboard is a must-have. Every smartphone I had prior to an iPhone had a physical keyboard, and I still prefer a physical keyboard after two years. The Droid has one, and the iPhone doesn’t – so it wins this one by default.

That’s not to say the Droid keyboard is all that great – nor is it terrible. It is decidedly average. The buttons are practically flush with each other, and it’s quite easy to jam down on two buttons at once.

To rank it amongst some of the more well known keyboarded handsets of the past few years: the Droid keyboard is better than that of the G1, Helio Ocean, and the BlackBerry Curve, but not nearly as good as anything from the Danger Sidekick line, the BlackBerry Tour, or the HTC Touch Pro 2.

The Winner: Droid, by default.

The Browser:

On the popular web-standards test known as Acid3, the iPhone scores a 100/100 while the Droid caps out at 93/100. Thus, if we’re going purely by measurable standards here, the iPhone browser wins. That said, we’re not robots – standards schmandards, we like what we like.

With that said, I still prefer the iPhone browser. It tends to render pages pixel perfect (as implied by the Acid3 test results), while the Droid would occasionally fall short. Oddly, it renders pages more accurately when they’re being viewed in landscape mode than in portrait mode. What really sealed the deal, however, was multi-touch in the browser. Once you’ve grown accustomed to pinch-zooming, the level of accuracy provided by tap-zooming alone simply doesn’t cut it.

The iPhone browser is also considerably faster, with page loads completing anywhere from 15-30% more quickly with both handsets on WiFi.

The Winner: iPhone, thanks to multitouch, faster pageloads and web standards compliance.

Navigation:

When it comes to the standard mapping/directions stuff, the two phones are about on par. Turn-by-turn voice navigation is a whole different matter, however.

Out of the box, the iPhone 3GS has Google Maps, which does not currently do turn-by-turn voice navigation. The App Store provides a bunch of solutions for this, ranging from a few bucks a month all the way up to a one-time payment of $99 bucks.

The Droid also has Google Maps, but it’s Google Maps with Navigation – and it really, really rocks. It does nearly everything the iPhone Maps app does, with the addition of toggleable layers (show/hide traffic, satellite views, Wikipedia entries, and transit lines), support for Google’s Latitude location-sharing service and, most notably, completely free turn-by-turn voice navigation. You can also search for locations by voice, something we were surprised was absent when Apple added voice recognition to the iPhone.

Like with the browser, we miss the multi-touch support – but we’d gladly give that up for the free voice navigation.

The Winner: Droid. None of the for-pay apps we’ve used come close to the ease of use and functionality Google provides in their free app.

Lock Screen:

On both the iPhone and the Droid, the lock screen is essentially just that: a screen which shows when your handset is locked. The Droid has one small (but clever) bonus feature thrown in which allows you to quickly silence the handset with a single swipe – but considering that the iPhone has a physical silence switch on the side, this isn’t a defining feature. Out of the box, both handset’s lockscreens are equally meh.

Yet, this is still somewhere the Droid manages to outshine the iPhone, by playing on the open nature of Android. Right within the Android Market, you can download applications which greatly expand the functionality of the lockscreen, such as the widget-based Flyscreen.

You can do similar things on an iPhone – but not without jailbreaking. Considering that Apple wanted to make jailbreaking illegal, it’s hard to consider things that require jailbreaking as fair equivalents to things that come straight from Google’s own catalog.

The Winner: Droid.

Battery Life:

I’ll be honest: I haven’t done a formal battery life test with the Droid. Hell, I’ve never done one with the iPhone, either. That said, I’ve been using both devices equally throughout the day, and they’re both hovering around a 50% charge. This holds true with what I’ve seen for the last few days of testing; the Droid’s battery life is right around par with the iPhone’s. The Droid’s 1400 mAh battery is slightly larger than the iPhone 3GS’ at 1150mAh, but the battery hungry multi-tasking probably cancels that out. Without any formal testing, I’ve got to declare it a tie.

The Winner: Tie (With a slight lean in Droid’s direction as it has a swappable battery – but really, what percentage of the population carries one?)

App Stores:

Google’s got around 10,000 apps in their collection. Apple’s got somewhere around 10x that, with the App Store currently floating right around 100,000 items.

Of course, quantity does not equal quality. As anyone who’s really spent a ton of time in either App Store would agree, the majority of applications in both range from bad to horrible, and their are plenty of gems in both. Both have a great application (and a handful of not so great alternatives) for nearly every common need.

The primary strength of the Android market is its openness. Google has stood quite true to their original promise of allowing anything outside of what was undeniably illegal or malicious. This is something members of the tech industry like to tout about as a killer feature – but in the end, it simply doesn’t matter. The only way to gauge the success of an App Store is to try to view it as an average consumer — you know, the ones spending the most money — would. By and large, the average consumer would not care about any of the things Apple has thus far banned. To make an argument that could go on for many pages very, very short: your grandma does not care about Google Voice.

After spending a lot of time in both stores, I feel that I can honestly say that the selection and overall quality of the App Store is significantly better. Everything we’ve seen and all conversations we’ve had with big development houses indicates that they’re putting much, much more effort in iPhone app development than they are with Android.

The iPhone has a tremendous lead here, both in quantity and quality. In time, as Android handsets flood the market and hopefully do away with the feature phone all together, it may very well catch up – but that’s simply not the case in the foreseeable feature.

Winner: iPhone.

Customization:

The smartphone is the fifth limb we never knew we needed. It goes with us wherever we go, helps us function from day to day, and serves countless purposes. Where as many turn to body art to customize their original limbs to express themselves and claim ownership, many will customize their smartphone for all the same reasons.

Customization on the iPhone is depressingly limited. You can customize wallpaper of the lock screen, change your ringtone, and.. well, that’s it. Want to add your own text alert sound? Nope. E-mail alert sound? Nope. That would be absolutely okay be it that the iPhone was a Nokia from 1998.

The flexibility of Android customization is still somewhat limited, but it at least has the basics covered. You can change e-mail and text alerts, app icons, and your ringtone/wallpaper.

The Winner: Droid

Camera Quality Samples:

Photos on the left are from the iPhone; photos on right are from the Droid. Click through to see bigger samples.

The Winner: Based off these photos alone, we can’t say. We had a hard time getting the Droid to focus, especially in lower light. While the iPhone was focusing just fine, the details kept getting lost. We’re not ready to make to make that call yet – we’ll snap some more shots tomorrow and make the final call.

The Screen:

The iPhone rocks a 3.5″, 480×320 touchscreen display, while the Droid has a 3.7″ 854×480 touchscreen display. While the Droid’s screen isn’t that much bigger, they’ve crammed over 160% more pixels onto that tiny little screen. The result? The Droid screen is absolutely, jaw-droppingly stunning.

Now, no one was complaining that the iPhone’s screen was junk. Given more than 10 seconds from device to device, most people probably wouldn’t even notice a difference. When you’ve got both devices side-by-side, however, the difference is clear. Text is that much clearer; curves just that much curvier.

The Winner: Droid

Interface:

This is a huge point, and one that often goes overlooked in reviews. For the past 10 years, Apple has really only done one thing, over and over: they’ve taken something we thought worked fine, and then simplified the hell out of it while maintaining the feature set. That’s exactly what they did to the idea of the smartphone with the iPhone, and it turned the damned market on its head. Windows Mobile suddenly looks like a hot mess by comparison, and most people would go into shock if they tried to screw with S60.

Even in version 2.0, Android does not match the intuitiveness of the iPhone. If you need to change a setting on the iPhone, you always know where to go: the Settings app. On Android, it can be in one of any number of places.

You can hand an iPhone to a toddler, and they’ll figure out the general gist of things in an instant. (No, really – we’ve done it.) That ease of use is one of the things that makes the iPhone so damned appealing.

The Winner: iPhone

Multi-Tasking:

I can listen to Pandora on the Droid while I peruse around the Facebook App. I can’t on the iPhone. Enough said.

The Winner: Droid

Conclusion:

There are really many, many, many dozens of categories we could dive in to – hell, I’ve got 10 more scratched out in my head alone. But we’d be avoiding an inevitable truth: apples-to-apples, the Droid tends to beat or meet the iPhone. Remote wipe and GPS location? Droid. On-device search? Droid wins. Voice control, contacts, coverage, and call quality? Droid, droid, droid, droid.

Now, back to the two questions we had at the beginning:

What do I think of the Droid? It is incredible. It is, hands down, the nicest Android handset on the market. A very significant chunk of this is not so much the Droid’s doing as it is Android 2.0’s, but the hardware is also leaps and bounds better than anything we’ve seen so far.

Would I recommend it over the iPhone? Two thousand plus words later, you might be a bit sad to read: Nope. But I wouldn’t recommend the iPhone over the Droid, either – and that’s the Droid’s real win here. This is the very first phone in over two years that I would consider carrying for day-to-day use instead of my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it whole heartedly to everyone.

Each phone platform has such tremendous merits. Androids got better navigation; the iPhone has a better browser. Androids got unbeatable expandability and flexibility; the iPhone OS is mind-numbingly easy to use and the rate of growth and drive behind the App Store is simply explosive.

With Android 2.0, we’ve come to a very difficult crossroad. No longer can we recommend one handset over the other simply by its feature set. At this point, it’s all about the person who will be carrying it. For you, dearest TechCrunch Network reader: Yes, I’d probably recommend the Droid over an iPhone. Would I recommend it for your mother, father, or little sister? Nope. If you want a phone that just works and does damned near everything you could want and don’t mind Apple’s closed garden: by all means, get the iPhone. If you can handle a bit of complexity for the sake of flexibility and don’t mind having to tinker a bit: by all means, get the Droid. At this point, I honestly feel that either choice would make any sane person incredibly happy.

 

source : http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/10/30/smartphone-showdown-iphone-3gs-vs-motorola-droid/