As I write this, I am ending my first full days worth of use with my Android Phone. I actually received the unit yesterday afternoon, and after about 90 minutes I had gone over every feature and all the current apps in the apps store.

The first thing to mention is that battery life is not so good. The phone came off its charger at 6:55 AM, and by 4:30 PM it had to go back on to charger. It takes about 30 minutes to get a full charge. Now my days use today was pretty typical for me, I spent 78 minutes on the phone, 54 of those minutes on speaker phone. No bluetooth. I did have the GPS turned on all day, and I used WIFI for about 20 minutes. The phone is set to auto sync with my Google Apps account. I did travel about 75 miles today, crossing some areas where I lose cell signal for about 15 minutes. I can only use edge, because there is no T-mobile 3G in Crossville, or all of Tennessee for that matter.

Oddly, the phone is crashing my 10.5 Macbook when I try to plug it into the USB port to charge. It does this both with USB storage turned on or off. I don’t think it’s my G1, because it plugs in fine to my 10.4 eMac at home to charge. So I think it might be my Macbook, it has some other issues anyway.

The interface is kind of kludgy, but I’m warming up to it pretty quick.

I use my own domain with Google Apps, and the Phone had NO PROBLEM syncing up and keeping me up-to-date with Emails and Calendar reminders. My Google Calendar has a couple of sub calendars on it, Business, Personal, Public, etc. I can only add stuff to ONE of those calendars, but the UI seems to have a spot where I could select another one, but no other one shows up. I’m guessing that it picked the default one for me to enter stuff in on. Entering an appointment is a little awkward, the UI for selecting time seems a bit inconsistent.

Email, I can read and reply to my messages, however, when I went to put in a signature, I could only “see” a couple of lines, but it seemed like I could enter more. Looks like a UI bug.

Contacts. BAD BUG!!! My contacts pulled down from Google, images and all. However, those contacts which are only a company name, are not showing up in the Android Contact list by the Company name, but rather by the phone number. (or just by the address for one contact that is only a company name and mailing address). There seems to be no way to adjust the view or sorting of contacts, they come up alphabetically by last name. I fear that contact feature on the phone is as bad as the contact feature on G-Mail.

Voice Dialing. Having been spoiled on Microsoft Voice Command, this feature seems very lacking. However, the voice recognition did work rather well, and was quiet accurate. However, you still have a UI button to confirm the call, so it’s not quite as nice as you think it should be. Also, no bluetooth activation of the feature. The good news is that the hard part of voice dialing is the accuracy of recognition, and android seems to have that licked, so if that polish up the apps functionality it might be a fair competitor to MS Voice Command. Also, Company Names do not work here, only first and last name, and the tag line “on mobile” or “at home” only changes the ORDER in which the number confirmation UI is given to you.

On a funny side note, the “flick to scroll” feature of the phone is messing with my head. My multi-touch Macbook has a feature to scroll pages. However the interface for scrolling “up” and “down” is exactly reversed between my G1 and my Macbook. On the Macbook the multi-touch gesture is designed to emulate the mouse wheel. To move down a scrollable page, your fingers move down the trackpad. But on the G1, it designed to emulate moving a peace of paper, which is the exact opposite motion. To move down a scrollable page, your finger moved “up” the screen.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a phone that had a movable screen, and even then I used my bluetooth headset 90% of the time. Now, when holding the G1 o my ear, my fingers feel the slide-out screen move ever so little, and it just feels odd.

All in all, it was a good day. In the world I am in now, with Google Apps and Macintosh, the phone made me feel more productive than my t-mobile Dash. However, it still did not have the same feeling of productivity as my T-mobile Dash did when I was in the Windows, Outlook, and Exchange world.

What will make or break this phone will be third party apps. As a phone by itself, it’s ok, but without the additional functionality of apps, it would not be worth it.

If you look at the iPhone, it survived the first year without third party apps, because it had the iTunes integration to fall back on, and a great web browser. Android does not have that “fall back” position of a media infrastructure. (yes, it did come with the Amazon MP3 store, but the lack of a headphone jack and/or bluetooth stereo, and NO video player, makes this phone a non-starter for a Portable Media Player.) So the only thing it can rely on would be awesome third party apps.

So comparing Android to iPhone on the merits of third party apps, I think Android has the greater potential. Yes, at this moment, there are tons of apps for the iPhone, but as a third party platform the iPhone biggest problem is Apple’s obsessive need to control it. Android has no such road block, it is free and open, and yes that will lead to chaos and we will see apps that can brick phones, but from that will emerge better applications that push the envelope. The four strongest advantages that Android has are, off web application installs, background processes, an open source os, and tight integration with Google, thus giving us “free” push email. If the iPhone had these, then there would be no market for Android. That is a danger, because there is no technical barrier to Apple doing these things, only artificial contractual issues.

If Apple opened up, just a bit, I fear that it will kill Android a borning.

I own both an iPod and a Zune, (5g Video and First Generation, respectively) I paid about the same for both on the ebay/woot after market. From a technical stand point my Zune far outreaches my iPod. Out of the box the G1 Zune had Wi-Fi, a faster processor and larger screen. But the iPod is the clear market dominator, so there is a virtual sea of third party “stuff” that will work with the iPod and not the Zune. Case in point, my car’s radio head unit works with my iPod, Bose makes my desktop iPod “Dock” with speakers, and because of the economy of scale, stuff like charges are much cheaper than comparable stuff for the Zune.

However market dominance in third party add-ons is not the only reasons to pick a device. So let me compare the two devices on a one-two-one scale.

Both devices play DRM free MP3s, and nether play open source OGG file. Both devices require trans-coding of Video to play it on the device, Apple uses MP4/H.264 while Zune uses the Windows Media format. The trans-coded files are roughly the same size and quality once finished, both can be played back on their respective platforms (Mac/Windows for the iPod and just Windows for the Zune), and both can be played via the “extension” options for the Desktop, (Apple TV for iPod, Xbox 360 for Zune).

The Zune has a larger screen, which makes viewing video much easier. I watched most of the first season of House MD while on the plain to Africa last fall on my Zune. The video screen on the iPod is more like an afterthought, or perhaps it was kept small to keep continuity with the earlier non-video iPods.

The Zune also has Wi-Fi, but that Wi-Fi is COMPLETELLY useless. You can use Wi-Fi to “Sync” your Zune, or to “Squirt” crippled music files to another Zune User, and that is all, nothing more. The Zune has an FM radio. The iPod is completely without any wireless connectively, in or out.

Real World battery life on both devices is about comparable. 2 to 3 hours of Video, 4 to 6 hours of Music. Both devices can store and show resized images synced for the desktop. This is where I was caught of guard with both units. I have 100,000+ images socked away on my systems. This amount of pictures can easily fit on the available memory of both devices, but both iTunes and Zune Desktop “resize” an image to make it fit on your device’s screen (which makes the image smaller in both pixels and bytes). However the resizing/coping process takes a few moments per image, and with the amount of images I have, the process took most of a day.

The Desktop Software is where the two devices really diverge. Both iTunes and the Zune Desktop take an “all your media are belong to us” approach to your music and video libraries. It’s more fare to compare Zune Desktop 2 to iTunes rather than Zune Desktop 1. ZD1 was a joke, ZD2 is more like a farce.

iTunes benefits from it’s long standing install base, so the software guys at Apple have some experience, feedback, etc, on what iTunes needs to be. Microsoft’s ZD2 chose to live in a cave and ignore the lessons learned by Apple.

<aside> To be fair to Microsoft, a cooperate lawyer was most likely standing over the shoulder of each programmer, everyday, to make sure that ZD did not look or act like iTunes, just to avoid a lawsuit. A note to Microsoft, patent law in this country needs serious reform, and that will only happen when a) congress does something (unlikely) or b) corporate titans fight it out to prove that software and basic concepts are not patentable. Microsoft, take the hit in the court room, your save money in the long run, have a better product, and we just may have a better society. </aside>

ZD2 just seems so illogical to me, and they also have made it Pink. Now I’m not opposed to the color Pink, I have a seven year old daughter, so most of my house is Pink. However I do want my Windows apps to look like Windows apps. ZD2 goes out of its way to look “cool”, but in reality it’s user interface is just annoying.

In the end it was the uselessness of the wifi, and the sad shape of the Zune Desktop which made me chose to use my iPod as my daily PMP. Ironically the Zune has the greater potential, so if the hacking community will rewrite the Zune OS I could very will see myself switching back to the Zune hardware (less the Zune Hardware).

With just some very basic software changes the downsides of the Zune could be over shadowed by the additional benefits. With full and complete Wi-Fi the Zune could easily become a Wireless Streaming Content receiver. The Zune could also have some basic information apps like weather, stocks, traffic, etc. While the physical interface is somewhat limited, Microsoft could do an online system very much like they used for their SPOT technology. A user could, from their desktop, go to MSN and select the content and apps they would want to use from their Wi-Fi Zune. Then when connecting from the Zune the user would have a more limited, but completely mobile, access to those previously selected items.

With better Wi-Fi access the Zune could become a great and easy Wi-Fi Network Attached Storage. All of the hardware and processing power are there, this is just simple software changes.

The Wi-Fi angle on the Zune still bugs me. Why not have used Bluetooth? You could accomplish the same limited “Syncing” and “Squirting” but also have added Bluetooth Stereo headset support. While this article has been limited to the Zune G1 vs. the iPod G5 Video, the same question hold true for the newer iPod Touch.