Verizon Droid Quick Review Plus Comparison with iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Verizon Droid Quick Review Plus Comparison with iPhone

danielfischer.com

52 pointstortilla33 comments

The main competitive advantage of the iPhone is not the features. It's the overall polish and UI.

Agreed. I haven't held the Droid, but most video reviews of the interface reveal a need to re-click items and a delay in scrolling/reacting to touch commands. That's my impression anyway. This doesn't happen with regularity on the iPhone.

I'm not saying this is a show-stopper; Android will get there. What's amazing, however, is that we're almost 3 years past Steve Jobs' first demo of the iPhone at Macworld, January 2007. I still can't believe how well they nailed it, first time.

I own an iPhone, but I love the open nature of Android. Whatever the Droid may lack in fit and finish it is going to be more than made up for by the degree of control it places in the owner's hands.

> What's amazing, however, is that we're almost 3 years past Steve Jobs' first demo of the iPhone at Macworld, January 2007. I still can't believe how well they nailed it, first time.

Let's not forgot that many features were missing from the initial iPhone release, and that there were rumors of the iPhone for years (i.e. how long were they working on it pre-release?). I imagine that the internals could have been a mess too; there was no SDK for that initial release other than "Use AJAX and Safari to make Web Apps for the iPhone! Yay!".

Yeah, and a year later they had the app store, and they nailed that.

That's the exact point of the guy you replied to. Apple doesn't always win feature battles, but it always wins in terms of how perfect its existing features are.

Well it's obvious that in the balance between look & feel and features, Apple went with the look & feel with the goal of features later.

That turned out to be a good choice.

Apple will probably always make something that's a bit nicer, but (hopefully) Android will be 'good enough', and win out on being more open and more friendly to those who want to hack with and on the platform. I for one have no interest at all in doing mobile were it to come to be exclusively controlled by Apple.

I would say the iPhone ui is VERY impressive and Apple is definitely the leader in terms of user experience and interface.

However, I'd say Google is almost just as strong in this department. I love the UI on Android 2.0 and it will only get better. I'm not missing anything from the iPhone UI and from my blog post... it just feels like "a breath of new air." It's nice to play with a new interface that works just as well as the iPhone.

To add to this - the only thing that I miss from the iPhone UI is that "spring action" when you scroll too far, it'll spring past the content then back up. I liked this effect and the android has the spring... just not the spring back.

e.g if you scroll really fast it'll just stop at the end of the content vs going past it then back up.

The iPhone's main competitive advantage is that it is made by Apple. They are cannibals. Apple is willing to eat red delicious in order to develop the best product possible; they will constantly release upgrades, iterations, and new products to beat the previous one. Will Motorola do the same? The StarTac and Razr tell me no. Hopefully, they have changed.

I was surprised by this conclusion: "I’d say [the Droid] is definitely the second best phone on the market..." It seemed to me that his points added up to it being better. The only one that was a solid win for the iPhone was the camera.

I read another review that put the browser performance as better on the iPhone.

Having written apps for both iPhone and Android I rate iPhone over Android - around 10x better - both as a user and as a developer.

Could you expand a bit on that statement with regard to development?

Could you indulge us further with this one?

Is that due to "Java vs. ObjectiveC/Cocoa" or is this an evaluation of the actual APIs?

Woah... I'm surprised one of my posts is on hacker news. WTF? That makes the geek inside of me want to throw a party. I'll clear up some questions that were asked here...

I was really shocked to see "danielfischer.com" when I loaded up news.ycombinator.com as per my daily schedule...

I'm not sure what he's complaining about with the Droid camera. It looks like it's just using a different white-balance setting than the iPhone.

I don't think he was complaining about the quality (although for a 3+ MP advantage I wouldn't be proud of those shots).

To my eyes… they’re roughly the same quality once taken. And if I’m not mistaken the 1st gen iphone is a 2.0 megapixel camera and the droid is 5 megapixels. Yeesh that’s embarrassing.

Reports have complained that the Droids camera takes ages to open, shoot, and process. I'll bet that's what he meant when he said it really sucks. That would make sense, given that the device must process a lot more to take in all 5MP. Hopefully they'll refine this process in the future for faster shots.

+1 you got it.

Is there any hope that someday people will stop to think that more Mpx is more quality? It's just bigger size, that's all. And if more Mpx are crammed on the sensor of the same size, that usually means more noise too.

Right but you get better quality in two scenarios:

1) take two pictures of the same size yields a better result with more megapixels

2) taking a larger sized picture on a camera with more megapixels and scaling it down yields a better result than taking a picture at the scaled down dimensions with a lower megapixel camera

I don't think so. A high noise shot scaled down still will have a bunch of noise in it. Double the pixel sensor size and you get a much better picture, in my experience.

For example: HD video cameras. They look like crap in the dark, even at YouTube dimentions. My Flip video SD beats them hands down.

I don't think we'll see the end of it any time soon. It's marketing. People have been told that more MP = better. It's really only professionals who know that there is much more depth to digital camera quality.

The issue is that the phone is apparently not auto-focusing properly. When you take a shot you'll often see red markers in the corners, which supposedly indicate that the camera couldn't focus (you're supposed to see green, at least according to some forums I've read — I see red every time). Rumored to just be a software problem that will be fixed in the next few weeks.

there's a bug in the droid camera focus software (so should be fixable OTA).

Its a very simple bug, and will be fixed via an update not sure when that will be though.

wait, so verizon is actually allowing the google maps gps app for free?

Yep, works well (got me from the VZW store to my house without trouble ;) )

All free... AND AMAZING.

Dan Fischer's still around! Small Internet: I used to be a moderator on a forum he owned.

Ha hey! Which mod were you? :)

Hey! Geez, you've been here longer than I've been.

I was on Writer's Beat. I think David/TGO introduced me to it? I just went on and checked how it today, out of curiosity: I was ronoxq.

Oh, hey! I remember you.

I sold WB a lil' while ago... what are you up to these days?

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