Nate, honey - a great number of companies have "bet the farm" on bad products. That's nothing new. And while the Droid may be an OK product in general, it is being touted as the iPhone killer by the marketing being put behind it. Besides, when you enter a market dominated by a very successful product, everything thereafter will be compared to that product AND the question of whether or not it is that product's "killer" comes up. That's how geeks roll.

I never said the Droid was shitty - just inferior. There are shitty aspects - like the keyboard, which is what I described as shitty. Please don't hang on verbiage as a way to get around having to argue on the merits.

I don't understand the need for a history/pricing/features recap in the conversation here, but you prove my point about why Apple is winning this battle - they spend their time and efforts putting together a great experience and don't compromise on that effort for the sake of openness or market "conventional wisdom".

I'm not amazed when talking about draining battery life, Nate. It's a big issue. To have a phone and phone OS/platform be successful, it needs to appeal to the average user. The average user isn't interested in constantly managing their apps or having to download extra software to manage their apps for them. They just want their phone to work and not eat their battery.

Look at Palm OS (not Web OS, but the old Palm OS) that allowed for apps to run in the background. I used to support these devices and I can tell you that every time I touched one of these devices, the person had left every app they owned running in the background without regard to how much resources or battery that consumed. They just wanted to switch back and forth between apps, not have to find some menu item to quit or go to some other place in the system to force quite the apps.

The point is that the average user isn't going to realize that leaving all those apps running will drain their battery. They're just going to notice that their Droid gets far less mileage than their iPhone did.

I'm not digging at background apps per se. Trust me - I want background apps on the iPhone. I hate it that I can't listen to my NPR streaming app AND check my email at the same time. I think that's fucking stupid...But I'm also savvy enough to know that IF it did, it would eat up more of my battery and use more of the limited memory.

And I'm sorry, Nate, but you're being disingenuous when you say you don't want Android compared to iPhone and that all you're asking is that it be given its own chance. I'm calling bullshit. You pick on iPhone users, you pick on the iPhone itself, but as soon as someone finds a flaw in your precious Android, you want us to stop picking back? Sorry, Charlie. It doesn't work that way.

Saying it's Apples and Oranges is a red herring too. They are in the same class of phone. They are directly competing technologies. That's like saying you can't compare a Cadillac to a Lexus - they're both luxury cars, but one is owned by a Japanese company while the other is American. Big shit. You compare them because they are competition, not because they are exactly the same. It's more like comparing a Granny Smith apple to a Fuii apple - not apples to oranges.

Now, on to that second comment...

You're just plain wrong when you say that Apple has DRM'ed music. When was the last time you opened the iTunes store, Nate? Apple's music has been 100% DRM free since January of this year. Not being able to sync with iTunes is NOT because of DRM. Period.

There is a solution, however. Google and Apple are still pretty cozy. There is no real technical reason iTunes syncing couldn't work. If Apple can include Google apps on iPhone out of the box, there's no reason Google couldn't come up with a deal with Apple that allows Android devices to sync. The only reason is 1. they don't want to 2. Apple won't go for it or 3. they can't figure out how to make it work. I'm guessing 1 or 2 are the most likely.

256MB may be enough for you - we'll see once there are 100K apps for Android (if that ever happens) and you've run out of space. You're dangerously close to sounding like Bill Gates when he famously declared that no one would ever need more than 16 K of RAM in a computer. You may not want to play games, but when you look at the iPhone app store the top 10 grossing apps of all time 8 of them are games.

You know what tells me? People like to play games on their phone and are willing to pay for quality games.

Which brings me to my next point about developers. No platform can survive without great developers. Developers have a number of hurdles to overcome with Android that isn't the case with Apple. This 256MB limit is just one of those hurdles. The other is that Apple has a far, FAR superior development environment. This is held up by myriad blog posts talking about how easy it is to develop an iPhone app. It's also proven by Google's recent release of its own programming language, which has gotten mixed reviews at best.

As for multi-touch, this is a losing argument for you right now. Yes, they will fix it, but that doesn't matter right now, does it? The fact that I can pinch zoom my Google maps app on my iPhone but can't do the same on Android is just bizarre. Yes, there are some patent issues, but again - Apple and Google are friendly and multi-touch is licensable. There is no real reason for multi-touch to not be enabled on the built-in apps other than they likely haven't gotten the user experience up to snuff yet.

Programming for multiple touch events is hard. Android is not a huge money-maker for Google. It's certainly not their #1 revenue stream, like iPhone OS is for Apple.

They also don't have a lot of incentive to polish it and fine tune it since most manufacturers are gonna modify it anyway. So, again, you're having multiple parties come up with multiples ideas of what a good user experience is and they're ALL being called Android devices. That kind of brand confusion will not help Android be a success.

Sure, developers can enable multi-touch in their own apps. I believe I mentioned that before...But the Google built-in apps can't be modified. So it's up to Google to do that. So, it's especially confusing to have some apps have multi-touch while others don't.

It's not about what's possible - it's about what exists right now. What exists right now is an inferior product compared to the dominant smart phone platform of the day.

Android has merits, like I said. It has a purpose, like I said...But unless it overcomes these very obvious deficiencies, it will never be in first place and could still be eclipsed by something else.

iPhone has deficiencies too, but they aren't game-changers. Many of Android's deficiencies are game-changers. App storage limits is definitely a game-changing deficiency. Lack of consistent user experience is a definite game-changing deficiency. Poor battery life (for whatever reason) is a game-changing deficiency. A dearth of available, useful apps is a game-changing deficiency.

None of them are insurmountable...But they exist and must be acknowledged...I don't think you acknowledge any of them in your reviews, critiques and iPhone bashing.

Nate, dear...You haven't owned an iPhone either. Like me, you've used someone else's device and looked at reviews to make your judgements. Using an iPod touch is NOT the same as using an iPhone no matter how much you squint at the screen. You don't do yourself any favors by throwing that argument out there.

We're talking about a phone, not a music player that does apps. People use their phone every day all day. When something is your primary device, your usage patterns are vastly different than if it's your music player or you're using the device to check things out. This would be much closer to an apples and oranges comparison than your earlier one, though I think it's more like apples and crab apples, probably.

I'm not saying Android is a total failure. Like I said before, it deserves a comfortable second place in the lineup. It's superior to everything ELSE out there other than the iPhone. That's a big achievement for being a new OS and platform. It has a lot of support, but that support comes from handset manufacturers that have historically been tone deaf to what users want and need.

Google has said they will never make their own handset, so they're at the mercy of these nincompoops who've allowed themselves to get trounced by a company that never made a phone before (Apple) and are now trying to play catchup by adopting someone else's technology (Google's). I'm not sure that's a recipe for success. Rather, I think it's a desperate attempt to remain relevant.

As I said before...I love you dearly, my friend, but you're not gonna win this particular argument.