Droid, iPhone, BlackBerry - Rock Paper Scissors

So, I have had the Droid for 3 weeks now. There were 3 main reasons I made the switch from my iPhone on AT&T. 1) I suck at typing on my iPhone, I really wanted the full qwerty keyboard of the droid. 2) The Verizon network is awesome. 3) FREEDOM to write my own applications or load whatever I want and also run lots of apps in the background. It's cool and powerful and all that. I LOVE the Google integration, it's amazing. The navigation app is unreal. It is MUCH better than any hardware navigation device I have ever owned. The Verizon network totally smokes AT&T's, especially on data services. I have written over half-a-dozen super cool applications that run in the background. Yes, I wrote them myself, in Perl. It was dead simple to load them. I wrote one basic application that turns off my ringer when I set down the phone face-down then turns it back on when I pick it up or turn it face-up. This was really simple to do and there is a how to included in the Google code. I wrote another application that turns on WiFi when I pull out the keyboard, then turns it off when I push it in. I wrote another one that checks to see if there are unmoderated comments and if so adds them to my notifications. The Droid is an amazing piece of technology. But, and I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, the Droid is like a Linux desktop computer. It's super powerful, totally customizable, but, yet it feels clunky and things crash and it's hard (in general) to get things to "just work". Writing all kinds of cool applications and installing neat stuff that can run in the background comes with a massive resource price. At one time I was using up my battery from full charge to completely dead in less than one hour. That is not talk time, that's just the phone sitting idle. Again though, it's my choice. One thing I was able to write is an application that would check for runaway processes that were hogging the cpu (which happens a lot on the droid) and kill them. I also had code from other scripts to extend the battery as much as possible and was able to get around 3-4 days battery life. Another thing is that sometimes the droid just becomes unresponsive..... then after 30 seconds or so a window will ask me if I want to wait or kill the process (there is no multitasking while this is going on, the phone is frozen). That is SUPER ANNOYING. On the plus side, I have figured out several of the things that cause this and will describe them in another post coming soon about how to soup up your droid. As far as the hardware goes, the keyboard is disappointing (which kind of defeated one of the main reasons I got the droid) and makes it a lot more heavy. I have also scraped the paint off of a lot of the edges of my Droid. Don't get the wrong idea... I like the Droid a lot. I am, however, having serious iPhone withdrawl. I miss having my entire music library on my phone. I miss having all my Photos on my phone. I miss having badass games on my phone. I miss having all my videos on my phone. And, yes I *COULD* do all this with the droid (except cool games, there just are none) but with my iPhone it was so easy I even forgot I was doing it. I just plugged my iPhone in and it synced with my photo albums and iTunes. It just worked. The fatal flaw in the iPhone is the AT&T network. After 2 conferences of not being able to use my phone during the show because AT&T can't handle the data, the iPhone is out. I can't have my cell phone cost me time and money. I also really miss some of the aspects of the BlackBerry(s). I can't type for shit on these touch screens. I had the world phone and the curve under Sprint. I could type like the wind on those phones with the keyboards. Yesterday while my wife was driving she handed me her Blackberry curve to text a friend for her and I fell in love again with the keyboard. I busted out a 160 word text in seconds. I realized how bad I am at typing on the Droid/iPhone and how I longed for the Blackberry keyboard again to actually respond to emails and texts. But the Blackberry for web browsing sucks, and yes, I use my phone for web browsing a lot. So what to do? I have about 6 days left until my 30 day test/trial/evaluation/get-out-of-your-contract expires with my Droid. Right now, I am leaning towards keeping my Droid phone and staying on Verizon. I would not however, at this point, recommend it to a non-technical friend. The coolest part about the droid is the amazing flexibility and permissions you have. Including permission to totally fuck it up too. I had had to factory reset my droid twice due to my screw ups. News that iPhone might be on Verizon soon makes me hard. Why can't I have an iPhone with a BlackBerry keyboard on the Verizon network? More to come on this.