I’ve had the Droid for a few days now. Here are my emerging opinions.

Things I like

• Background processes – push email, IM, and notifications in general provide a superior communication experience.
• Surprisingly long battery life. Despite running all those background applications, the phone’s battery is still at half full after 12 hours.
• The LED on the front bezel blinks when you have something waiting for your attention – no need to turn on the screen.
• It’s fast. Most applications seem to have almost no load time.
• The slide out keyboard lights up in the dark.
• Facebook and Google sync everything in the background. When a new contact appears in Gmail, it’s automatically on the phone.
• The screen is extremely readable. Font rendering is especially good compared to the iPhone.

Things I do not like

• The camera takes horrible pictures and does not focus properly.
• Scrolling the home screen is rough.
• The virtual keyboard does not automatically appear when a text input field is highlighted. You have to tap the field to summon the keyboard.
• There is a limit of 3 home screens.
• Some of the applications that I enjoyed on my iPhone do not yet have an Android equivalent. Amazon Kindle is the one I miss the most.
• They layout algorithm for the home screen truncates application names longer than one line, even when there is obviously plenty of space.
• The interface aesthetic needs a lot of work. For starters, the black background featured in some parts of the interface is mismatched with the gray gradient background found in other parts. There needs to be a universal design tying all the components together. This would also help unify the appearance of third party applications as their developers take cues from the standard UI and widget set.
• The volume rocker and camera button have too much play, which makes them feel cheap.

• China Unicom reported only 5000 iPhones sold in the first week. This is in stark contrast to the 1 million new 3G subscribers it gained in total. Also, the iPhone App Store is not available, and neither is Wifi. This is a huge hit against the iPhone’s greatest strengths, apps and web browsing.
• Verizon just launched the Motorola Droid. The new phone is echoing around the blogosphere, leaving an impression as a true iPhone 3GS competitor, and in some ways, shows itself to be a superior product.
• Exclusivity with carriers in various countries creates a smartphone vacuum amongst the carriers that are not partnered with Apple. Android is steadily moving into these free spaces. In the US, these include Verizon and Sprint, among others.
• While yearly iterations on the iPhone platform have steadily improved Apple’s product, Android has nearly accomplished product parity in only two thirds the time.

Why Not:

• Android as a commercial platform for application developers is not currently as attractive as Apple’s solution. Google is trying to populate the store with higher quality applications through its Android Developer Challenges, but this also has the unpleasant side effect of temporarily suppressing the Android Market economy. Many of the high quality apps made for these challenges are released for free, wiping out revenues for entire application niches.
• Applications in the store seem to convert fewer buyers than their counterparts in the iPhone App Store.
• Piracy seems to be a more significant issue on Android, which might be a direct cause for the low conversion rates.

Niggles:

• The Droid camera autofocuses poorly, and the color processing is significantly more bland than that of the iPhone 3GS. However, this should be addressable with a software update.
• Applications can only be installed on the phone’s internal memory, which on the Droid, has an upper limit of 256MB. This means larger applications must install a small binary that will download the remainder of the application for installation on the removable memory.

Future Strategy

It’s very likely that the iPhone’s dominance will end in the near future if Android continues advancing at such a rapid clip. Apple is currently stuck in disadvantageous exclusivity contracts while its competition enjoys free roam among all other carriers. Apple’s saving grace is a superior application library and application discovery interface. If Android can revamp its approach to applications and find out where it can find its own iTunes-like foothold, things will start to get a bit more interesting.

Google stands to be the major winner if Android succeeds, even though it’s giving everything away for free. In the same manner Microsoft overtook Apple in the early days of Silicon Valley, Google stands to take over Apple in the mobile wars thanks to hardware independence and a strong foothold in personal online information. If Google releases a Sync application, perhaps within Google Desktop or Chrome, the stability of the foothold it could establish in competition with Apple will be tremendous. Currently, nearly everything on Android can be easily synchronized with Google’s services. However, a few strategic services remain unimplemented, such as media. In the same way Google Docs has displaced Microsoft’s Office in many small workplaces, Google could also displace iTunes using an online equivalent.

Is Google planning to buy Dropbox?

If you’ve ever wondered how to synchronize iCal with Google calendar, well, here’s how.

You can use this to synchronize calendars across multiple computers. Just sync up each one with the same Google calendar and you’re set. Any item created at one computer will transfer to the others.

Now, I’ve discovered how to use email aliases that I’ve previously set up using Gmail.

When setting up your mail account on the phone, use the “Other” account option. I suggest selecting the IMAP toggle. Then enter the email address you want to use and fill out all the other information using your Gmail info.

To add an additional alias, create another account of type “Other.”

1. Select POP mail, and enter the address you would like to use as the alias.
2. Under the incoming mail option, put in a single character for each field. (These can be optionally removed later.)
3. For outgoing mail, enter your Gmail info.

What this does is set up one account that can sync with your Gmail, and multiple additional accounts that can only send through your Gmail SMTP account.

When you send mail, you should now see an additional “From:” field, where you can choose your alias.

voice.google.com

It’s actually quite functional. I like the message transcription with confidence levels, the convenient phone number links, and the quick call field.

I still think they should make a native version for iPhone.

Well, ponder this: Currently, Chrome monitors its processes, including individual tabs and plugins.

It doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to project this kind of analysis into the world of extensions. Advanced extension users could spot sources of slowdown in the browser, and Google could provide supplemental tools to help extension developers drill down into nether regions of their extensions to enhance speed and memory usage. As an added bonus, extensions could be tracked individually, allowing the developers to receive live aggregated feedback on their extensions’ performance in the wild.

Imagine — Google Analytics for your Chrome Extensions!

Other hopeful features for Extensions:

* Updates are installed without forcing a browser reboot.
* If individual extensions malfunction, they don’t bring the browser down.
* Extensions are as easy to write as web apps. (CSS/HTML/JS)