Hello there. I have recently switched from the iPhone 4 to the Droid X and wanted to share my experiences with the two to help others make a more informed decision.
I have been an avid apple fan, and bought my first iPhone (2g) in June 2009 to use with T-mobile. I was very impressed and liked the phone, especially jailbroken. I lost the phone, so decided to switch to AT&T to try out the iPhone 4. Since then, I have decided to switch to Verizon with the Droid X.
I will first review the iPhone 4, then I will review the Droid X, and at the bottom I will compare the two.
iPhone 4:
Like I said, I orginally had the iPhone 2g (first generation). I was extremely impressed with the phone; it was like no other phone I had ever used, years ahead of its time. Before this I had a windows mobile phone. The technology in the iPhone 2g seemed like it was 10 years in the future.
Having said this, the next iPhone I purchased was the iPhone 4. Being 3 generation and 4 years later, I had very high expectations. However, I really was not impressed. Don't get me wrong it is still an excellent phone, just not that jump I would expect. Yes, it is significantly faster. Yes, it has a nicer, higher resolution screen. Yes, it takes higher resolution photos and the HD video is definately sweet. Front facing camera? Cool, but I will never use it.
Other than that, the iPhone 4 is still just an iPhone. There were little things that pissed me off with the original iPhone that have still not been addressed. For example,
1. There is a glitch with the light sensor. when it is against your face it thinks it isn't and this leads to muted phone calls, hanging up the phone, and triggering facetime. This gets really really annoying, and is just as bad as dropping calls. It makes AT&Ts service even worst even though I am not actually dropping calls I may as well be since I am muting mid conversation or unintentionally hanging up mid conversation. I assume this glitch will be fixed with future updates.
2. There is only one button on the phone. I always thought since the iPhone is mainly a phone, it should have dedicated buttons for this. For example, if you are doing whatever, say surfing the web, and you want to make a phone call, you have to hit the one button (home button) on the phone and it will bring you to the home screen. After this, you have to hit the phone button hot key. In my opinion, there should be a dedicated physical phone button and a hard text messaging button, and maybe a couple other user-assigned buttons.
3. Without jailbreaking the phone, you cannot customize the lockscreen. The iPhone has a lock screen that only displays the date and the time. This is stupid. There is all that extra space, and I like to have my upcoming callendar events, tasks, weather, etc on this lock screen. Why not? it is empty space. Relating to this, there is no way to see your upcoming events unless you physically open the calendar app. Other than this, the only way you will know is if you have an alert set up, an alarm will go off at the time you specify. I like to see my day laid out, what events are coming up today, tomorrow, etc, without just finding out an hour before.
4. Multitasking doesn't really work. With OS 4.0 came multitasking with the iPhone (you could always do this with a jailbroken iPhone). However, it is not really multitasking. Some apps will actually run in the background, such as GPS, Pandora, etc, but most applications such as White Pages, Flashlight, etc do not actually run in the background. They just shut down and resume from where they left off when you "switch" back to them. I understand for the average user this will save battery, but I like to have control over this and would rather manually close applications.5. You have to pay for GPS. If you want to use the phone for GPS, you have to either use some shitty free app that doesn't really work (mapquest), pay for a monthly subscription (GPS Drive), or purchase one for $70.00 (Tom Tom).
6. Bluetooth turns itself off/no dedicated button. I use a bluetooth receiver attached to my stereo to listen to music. However, whenever I am out of range for X amount of time, it turns off. If I want to listen to it again, I have to go back into settings, general, bluetooth, then turn it on. Although not a huge deal, it is still annoying. There should be the option to have a dedicated bluetooth on/off button.
7. Nothing to Undo. I never quite understood this, but for some reason when writing text messages a pop up that says "nothing to undo" will obnoxiously appear on the screen. Not only until I googled it did I find out that apparently when you shake the phone it undoes what you typed. A pretty useless feature that even after I read about I never actually used but it never ceased to stop inadvertently popping up nonetheless.8. Applications Crash. The iPhone is not flawless as one might think, there is still the occasional application crash where it either won't open at all or opens and immediately crashes. Sometimes this requires restarting the phone, other times reinstalling the application.
Droid X
I write this a few weeks later because there was a pretty big learning curve on the Droid to get used to. The phone is much more complicated and takes a longer time to learn, but with these things comes much more options and customization. Both the service and customer service with Verizon is much better so I am definitely happy with that.
Little things that piss me off:
1. You have to pay for visual voicemail. Thats right, $2.99/month for visual voicemail.
2. You have to pay to use the phone as a WiFi hotspot. Again, sucks. Although at least the droid offers it.
3. The battery life sucks. If you intend to use the phone for anything beyond a few phone calls and text messages don't expect to be able to get through a full day.
4. It is hard to reach some things on the screen. The screen is so big that when using the phone with one hand it is hard to reach the top of the screen which just so happens to be where the notification bar is.
5. Speech to text sometimes doesn't connect. Speech to text is an awesome feature but sometimes does not work.
6. Applications Crash. This happens more often than on the iPhone 4.
7. It takes forever to customize it exactly how you want it. But hey, at least you can, right?
Now to compare the iPhone 4 versus the Droid X
Overall I must say that the iPhone is a much more refined piece of technology. Because Apple has to preapprove all applications in the app store, creates the hardware and the software for the phone, everything runs much smoother than the Droid X.
Major differences:
1. Widgets. The Droid OS has these things called widgets that are associated with many apps. They allow you see information from within an app without opening it. For example a 5 day weather forecast on the home screen rather than having to open up the weather app. Or a layout of your agenda showing upcoming appointments on your homescreen instead of just getting an alert an hour before your appointment (iPhone). They are very nice.
2. Battery Life. As stated above, The battery life of the Droid X is pretty bad. The iPhone will outlast it easy 2-3x as long.
3 Smoothness of Operation. The iPhone is much more smooth and overall refined. Everything just flows- scrolling, opening apps, etc. The Droid X seems almost like a rough draft that was pushed out before everything was thought through. Everything generally chunks between each other. It's not unbearable, but definitely noticeable.
4. Navigation. The iPhone is simply more easy to use than the Droid. The learning curve is much smaller. Take for example the fact that the iPhone has 1 button and the Droid has 4. There are more menus etc to navigate through, probably at least partially due to the fact that there are more options.
5. Level of Customization. The iPhone only lets you alter certain aspects of the phone. With the Droid, you can pretty much make the phone do anything you want it to do. However this comes at the expense of instability and a big time investment.
6. Integration of Applications. This is a big one here- with the Droid X everything is better integrated. When you install an application it is automatically linked to other applications. For example, facebook will automatically sync photos and information with your phone book. A reverse phone number look up will automatically link with your call log. A GPS running log will automatically link with Facebook. With the iPhone, each app is independent of another. If you want to reverse look up a phone number, you must first open your call log, get the number, and enter it into your reverse look up app etc.
7. Camera/Video Camera. You know with cheap digital cameras when you move the camera back and forth it kind of chunks along, is not smooth? Well that is like the Droid X. The iPhone 4 takes phenominal video, it is not even a comparison. Yes they are both HD but the iPhone is much more refined.
8. Other charges. As mentioned above, if you want a decent voice guided GPS for the iPhone, you are going to need to shell out $70. On the Droid X the google maps software is excellent. And best of all, free. On the other hand, the visual voicemail through AT&T is free, where as it is $2.99/month for the Droid X.
9. Swype. This is a new input method with the Droid X. It involves sliding from key to key to form words rather than individually hitting letters. I found it to be easier when driving but still do not tend to use it much. 10. Speech to Text. I did not think I would really end up using this much, but it is incredible on the Droid. It is imtegrated into anywhere there is a keyboard and it works very well. You speak, and it types what you say. Awesome.
And some smaller differences worth mentioning:
1. Display. The iPhone 4's display is much more vivid and clear. The Droid X has a much larger screen but it is not as nice to look at.
2. Size. It wasn't really an issue to me since I have big hands, but the Droid X is very large as far as phones go. The big screen is a good and a bad thing. It will fit in any of my pockets but it doesn't seem like much of a girl phone to me.
3. Keyboard. The keyboard seems harder to use on the Droid X, The auto correction does not work as well.
