Original Droid and you can have updates very soon after N1 gets them thanks to Cyanogen. You also will be working with a bit more limited resources - less memor

Original Droid and you can have updates very soon after N1 gets them thanks to Cyanogen. You also will be working with a bit more limited resources - less memory, and slower processor, which should help save you from writing stuff that will only run well on the N1. The Droid is very capable for foreground processes, but once you start running too much, the memory constraints kick in - this can be useful to test if you rely on a background service. Once the Droid is rooted and has a good recovery image loaded, you can back up and go from "Stock" to some aftermarket ROM for testing a variety of scenarios if needed. I would recommend testing with an HTC Incredible as well - with that, there's the possibility of switching between Stock HTC build and Cyanogen using the bootloader (requires "rooting"). I'm finding quirks with SenseUI (most annoyingly, the keyboard throwing the same event multiple times) that I would have never caught without the device in my hand. Also, keep in mind depending on what you're doing, some built in Vendor app (Verizon, etc) might interfere, so testing on a purely stock Google build phone might cause you to miss something.