…Or so I thought, until I had owned a MyTouch 3G on T-Mobile running Android 1.6 for about 4 days. I had assumed I was hearing “Android isn’t an iPhone killer” because most users weren’t technically adept enough to leverage the power of what I assumed was a potentially far superior, open OS with a growing user base.

My disappointment upon owning an Android phone for 4 days was so great it actually threw me into a funk for a day or two. The iPhone, even before jailbreaking it, was an order of magnitude superior an experience in virtually every way.

- The number of essential, useful and/or fun apps I found on the iTunes App Store when it was 2 months old was astounding. The number of similarly useful or delightful apps I can find on Android market , which has been around for over 18 months? A mere fraction of that. The apps generally pale in comparison. The simple, ingenious utilities I had on the iPhone have no equivalents in the Market, simple utilities have yet to be written in better than a half-baked form (Is it really so hard to put my SMS history in a widget on my desktop?) and the games… let’s not even go there. I’ve combed the marked and haven’t found more than 1 or two truly addictive Android games yet, and even those have graphics straight out of 1998. On the iPhone I had multitudes of addictive games with fast, very high-quality visuals. Mostly it feels like the app store has been stocked with programs by very smart teenagers… lots of potential there, but not yet up to snuff.

- Once jailbreaking it, modding the iPhone was actually much easier and ultimately more fun and painless than it is on the Android phone. Dpkg, please!

- T-Mobile’s coverage is pathetic – and I’m being kind here. Living in the middle of San Francisco, I rarely get a 3G signal – and never get one indoors, or anywhere within a 7 foot perimeter around my building. The phone gets 1-2 bars of wifi from my router while my Macbook, sitting right next to it, gets 4. It only gets 3 bars when I set it right next to the router. And the couch I used to sit on chatting away over AT&T with my iPhone? We have 3 T-Mobile phones in the apartment, and none of them get phone coverage anywhere in that entire room.

- I pushed my iPhone HARD, and was accustomed to running out of memory, slowdowns, etc., but nothing like the time I spend waiting for things to happen and/or force-quitting apps on Android. I rooted the phone and installed the Super D rom, and performance is a bit better. But it’s still nothing to write home about compared to the iPhone I purchased a year before my MyTouch even hit the stores.

- The Android Market app itself seems to have been written with the least thought possible. The list of useful, simple features the iPhone store app has that Market sorely needs is as long as my arm. Huge, barely-categorized, unsorted lists of apps? No way to tell if an installed app was free or paid, or how much a paid app cost, without visiting the Google Checkout site? No way to know which version a comment is for? No way to batch-update my apps? Puh-lease.

I could go on at much greater length, these are just off the top of my head. Suffice it to say… I can’t believe I am even saying this… when the new iPhones (likely) debut this summer, I will be switching back to Apple and AT&T and their respective foul, predatory corporate policies. :facepalm: God help me.