What’s the adavantage of Droid over iPhone?
It's not Apple? ;-)
Really, it's the open source O/S. There are multiple Android-based phones, but only one iPhone. Competition is a Good Thing.
It’s open source software, whereas the iPhone software is proprietary.
It’s not AT&T.
iphone is more user friendly.. The Droid is more technical and takes getting used to.. What I don’t like about the Droid is it’s too easy to touch a button you didn’t intend on touching.. Very frustrating!
Droid is Verizon and you are not tied in to only Apple approved apps. Both are very good. I have an Ipod Touch and now a Droid, and love both interfaces. Android is the first thing I have seen that remotely rivals the Apple interface. It is different, but not better or worse. Both are A+ quality, IMO.
Cost, functionality, configurability. Oh, and Android phones don’t care what you run on them, you’re free do run any application you like, and develop in any language you like.
Amongst other things, Android will be getting Flash in June, and the iPhone will never get Flash. If you to surf the hundreds of thousands of web sites that only use Flash, don't buy the iPhone.
“Confirmed: Flash Coming to Android Phones in June
In an official blog post, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch confirmed that Flash 10.1 support will be coming to Google Android phones in June, with a developer preview at the Google I/O conference on May 19-20.
This may dovetail with the launch of Android 2.2, which Google vice president Andy Rubin said earlier this week will include Flash.
We saw Flash running on Android phones back in February. Back then, Adobe said that Flash will run on phones with ARM Cortex-A8 processors and 50 MBytes or more of available RAM. That means Flash will run on the Google Nexus One, HTC Incredible, and Motorola Droid, but not the T-Mobile G1, MyTouch 3G, HTC Hero, or HTC Droid Eris, for instance.
While Apple is obviously off the list for Flash support, Lynch reconfirmed that Adobe is continuing to develop Flash for other platforms, including “RIM, Palm (soon to be HP), Microsoft, Nokia and others.” RIM confirmed earlier this week that it's working on Flash for BlackBerrys, and Adobe had a basic demo of Flash on a Palm Pre at the Mobile World Congress trade show in February.”
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363274,00.asp
Well there are a lot more phones to choose from for starters. Oh and you don’t have to be on AT & T’s service.
It’s inevitable that Google will win it’s smartphone war against Apple. Phone manufaturers like free and Android is free.
According to the MSheeple who obsess on trashing Mac threads here on FR, the Droid's sole advantage is it is not from Apple...
If your prefer Verizon to AT&T
Multiple vendors, mainly, so far more choice in hardware. The downside to this is that it's not consistent, and neither are versions. Android 2.1 is out, but some networks haven't made it available to their users on some phones yet. When a new iPhone OS is out, everybody gets it.
It also depends on what you value. Apple's App Store is restrictive, but that also means fewer crap and/or dangerous app. The Droid market is far less restrictive, which means more apps and more freedom for apps, but also has a higher potential for crap and dangerous apps. I've seen a lot of complaints of apps crashing Droid systems. Meanwhile Apple reviews each app for stability.
I've used both. As far as usability, the iPhone still has it. And after using a Droid for a while, I understand Apple's hesitance to allow multitasking. I flip to an app, use it, flip home. As a user I shouldn't have to worry about how much battery that app is now taking. Other usability bits apply. People complained about Apple taking too long to implement copy and paste, and now we know why. Copy/paste on the Droid sucks in comparison to Apple's.
Droid apps are also not consistent. For example, different date input methods are used. That's not good. A user, when hitting a date input field, should be presented with a standard picker.
Other than that, I'd still say Android is a very good system. There's a bit of a learning curve, and you have to be a bit more careful, but the phones are generally pretty good and many of the apps out there are very good. Also, if you are one of those who distrusts Google, you might not want to get one. Android is highly integrated with Google's services.