I'd been watching Verizon's Droid with a certain amount of interest of interest of late, and after seeing many favorable reviews and being suitably impressed with my coworker's new Droid, I jumped from an iPhone 3G to a new Motorola Droid.

What the hell was I thinking?

Now, in all fairness, it's possible that I just got a bad piece of kit, but my impressions are, shall we say, extremely unfavorable. Five minutes after I walk out of the store with it, it crashes on me while I'm scrolling through the settings application, and reboots itself.

Yeah, that kind of set the tone for my whole relationship with it...

That was a recurring theme throughout the weekend—I try to do something simple, and the device crashes, freezes, and generally makes a nuisance of itself. I finally got annoyed on Sunday evening and took it in to the Verizon store, and they did a factory reset for me. Then they told me the hardware was fine and that the problem was my GMail account was messed up and was causing the sync to screw up and make the phone freeze. "See, we skipped the Google account setup this time, and it works perfectly!"

So... you're telling me my Google account isn't compatible with my Google phone?

I tried turning off sync, but this was not particularly successful, and everything kept crashing and making me a very sad panda. I don't like being a sad panda. :(

The last straw came this evening when it crashed repeatedly in the space of a few minutes, requiring me to pop the battery cover off and remove the battery when what I really wanted to be doing was shopping for dinner. I wasn't asking it to do anything particularly taxing—just to scroll a page of Google search results, something the iPhone has managed to do pretty much flawlessly for years.

The result: I got seriously annoyed and dropped by the AT&T store to reactivate my iPhone 3G—and I should note that they were kind enough to let me come crawling back without paying the ETF, though I guess their policy is 30 days—then went down the street to the Verizon store to return the Droid.

What really drove home the point: I had to wait about 30 minutes for a sales rep at Verizon, and spent that time playing around with my iPhone since it had been reactivated. For the next 30 minutes or so, I spent my time bouncing between Tweetie, Beejive IM, and catching up on Google Reader in Mobile Safari—I was pushing it hard and I had absolutely no crashes, no freezes, no problems of any kind. iPhone OS 3.1 is just rock solid, and Android really has not given me the best impression here...

But why, you may ask, didn't I just take it in and ask for replacement hardware? It's a fair question, and I did in fact consider doing that. However, my coworker also has a Droid and he's having a lot of problems with it as well*, so that kinda suggested to me that there's a problem with the line as a whole, not just with my device. Either that or there's a much higher device failure rate than I'd like to see, and i didn't like my odds of getting a working device next time around. That said, one of my friends apparently got a Droid today, and I hope he has better luck with it than my coworker and I have.

Also... I've found more and more the last few years that I have a very low BS tolerance threshold anymore. I just want stuff to work without having to waste time fussing around with it. The Droid may be faster, it may have an undeniably nicer screen, but my iPhone actually works for an extended period of time and syncs my GMail account without freezing up, so that automatically makes it a winner. :P

It all worked out in the end—my iPhone is reactivated, I didn't have to pay the ETF to AT&T, and I canceled my service soon enough with Verizon that I got all of my money back from them. I also learned a very important lesson: I shall never again doubt the wisdom of Almighty Steve, nor shall I question the flavor of the Kool-ade which He so generously provides us.

That said, the Droid's 854x480 screen is gorgeous and I'd like an iPhone with one. How about it, Steve?

* Actual conversation with my coworker this morning:

Me: "So how do you like your Droid?"
CW: "It crashes..."
Me: "Yeah, I kinda noticed that..."
CW: "... a lot."
Me: "Yup."