I develop apps for both iPhone and Android. I stopped carrying my iPhone for personal use, and use my Droid Bionic full time. Here are the 3 reasons why. 1.

I develop apps for both iPhone and Android. I stopped carrying my iPhone for personal use, and use my Droid Bionic full time. Here are the 3 reasons why. 1. Google Maps, and navigation. If you're actually driving places, google maps is an amazing godsend. If you're taking mass transit, it blows the doors off what's on the iPhone. Ever get on a bus with your iphone, and have it vibrate in your pants when the next bus stop is the one you need to take? Google navigate shows you your mass transit trip in a schematic view that shows you where all the stops are in list form, and animates the little bullet point in the list as you move between stops. It's breathtaking. It'll be hard to beat Google Maps on an iphone, and I missed this sorely. For me the maps are so superior that during the brief time that I used iPhone, I used it as a wireless hotspot and kept my old android phone around just for the maps and navigation. I'm new to my city (San Francisco) and my whole experience of moving here was greatly enriched by the awesomeness of Google Maps. Many people probably already know where they're going or are already familiar with their mass transit options, so using a second class citizen for navigation (such as the iPhone) is probably fine for them. 2. Google Mail. Google's gmail app UI is awesome. I didn't know how much I loved it until I had to use iOS for a while. Bundling things by conversation is great. And I often receive 20-30 emails that are all divided into a total of about 3 conversations. Google lets me read and archive or delete those in 4 clicks (3 checkboxes for the 3 conversations, then one click of Archive or Delete). The iOS mail app makes me do that in around 60-80 clicks: either a swipe on the index page followed by a delete, or else a click on each email, followed by a delete. 3. Notification bar. I can always look at the top bar of my droid and know what, if anything, needs my attention. Or at the very least, why my phone made a noise in the last few minutes. It was hard for me to see at a glance what things just caused my phone to beep. If I received a meeting reminder, and a text, and something else, it was always clear on my droid which things need my attention, because of the status bar. There wasn't something like this on the iPhone. A few days ago they implemented a status bar on the iPhone, but it still feels like a cheap immitation of what Android does, in much the same way that the author here talks about how Android is a cheap clone of iOS. But to be clear, the "feel" of the iPhone is superior in pretty much every way. But to me, it's not all about feel.