On Saturday night I got a call from my friend Robert Scoble to check in to see if I had been insane enough to go surfing on Saturday in the giant swell that had hit the coast (I was busy). I had just wrapped up CFdevCamp to a great success (Thank you Sid, Rachel, Adam and all of the others that attended and mentored new ColdFusion people) and was coming home after a long day. Robert had been tweeting most of the day about getting a Motorola Droid and I asked him what he thought. Knowing the Mobile Geek that I am, he invited me over to try it out and compare it to the other phones I own and use.

After playing with the phone for a bit Robert turned on Cinch and we recorded our thoughts
You can listen to them here

After our recording we then did what has become a bit of a traditional Saturday night when Robert is in town, a walk down and drinks at the Fire Pits at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay.

On Sunday Robert put up a great blog post about our findings and refined some of his thoughts about the Droid
The Droid fails AS A PRODUCT when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone

Please check out the comments on the post. Below is my response to many people claiming that we were bashing the Android.
Sometimes its not the OS that is the issue, but the form of the product which was the main thrust of our issues with the Droid.
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One thing I wanted to mention here on our review of the platforms is that I was not saying that android is a bad OS in anyway. My big issue was Motorola’s execution of it with this phone which is quite poor in my opinion. The HTC hero, HTC Droid Eris with HTC Sense UI are great phones that run Android great and are good to use. They are not better than my Palm Pre but they are good phones. The iPhone is a good phone as well but we all know there is issues with it and HTC and Palm have both released phones that overcome them in some ways and not in others.

Android has great potential as an operating system but it does not have the polish and UI experience that the iPhone and Palm webOS do. The HTC sense UI is better and I am very excited to see what the Rachel UI from Sony will bring.

I also want to point out one thing that many of you may have missed in the recording, at the end we give a comparison of price of the different plans.

When it comes down to cost per month, the Droid is very expensive compared to the Palm Pre or the Sprint HTC hero. Sprint has done a ton over the past few years to build out their network and in most cases if you don’t have Sprint you roam over onto Verizon for free (with the everything plans) which essentially gives you the same network. So if you have the same network, Sprint is the better choice as it will cost you almost half of what a Verizon plan will.

The Droid is an interesting Phone, but I think if you want an Android Phone on Verizon, I would go with the Droid Eris rather than the Motorola.