Goodbye Droid, I’ll be Back.

I bought my first Android phone the day the G1 came out. It lasted three days.

I bought the Motorola Droid and it lasted almost a month, until I finally realized I just couldn’t do it over breakfast with fellow former Droid owner Bijan last week.

First, what is better:

Email, for Gmail users, is the best experience on any phone. Also Calendar, Maps, Google Listen (I love podcasts including TED and TAL), Google Voice, and several others are just better than anywhere else. I also found Android innovating where I wasn’t expecting. Such as a feature to tell you exactly what percent of your battery is being used by what app, or the ability to return purchases from the App Store (ahem, Market) within 24 hours.

The killer (as in dead) feature:

However. There is something horrifically and terribly wrong at the task management level of Android. What you never want happening in any user interface is to initiate an action, and have nothing happen. In a mobile phone, that is even more critical - especially when you wait 10 seconds and then are met with “Force Close?”

How often does this happen? In my few weeks with the Droid it was happening several times daily. Often when doing something as simple as typing out an email there would be intermittent freezing. I disagree with Stewart Alsop’s overall characterization that the hardware is close but the OS doesn’t work — but I absolutely think he nailed the worst thing of all. After four days I picked my iPhone back up and knew whenever I clicked or scrolled it would respond and that makes a huge difference.

That wasn’t the only thing. For instance, apps were generally unpolished, the keyboard is useless, the battery cover falls off every ten seconds, and someone should tell Motorola that no one wants a masculine phone. Even guys want something sexy, a sports car not a Hummer.

But as I was returning my Droid I picked up an HTC Droid Eris and found that it felt great. Also, the HTC TouchFlo approach added all the OS-level UI polish, and some base apps (like Twitter) that I would have wanted. But, alas, HTC has not yet released a Droid phone with a keyboard.

But if HTC, or someone else (Google perhaps) releases an Android phone, with a keyboard, and software updates can manage to keep the thing from hanging then I’ll be back on Android for good.

(ps - do I have to return the t-shirt that arrived today?)