Which is best: Droid, Droid or Apple?

For a month I've been carrying around two different Verizon Droid phones. Last month I got a pre-launch demo at my local Verizon Wireless store and wrote a review based on my original impressions.

The day my review appeared, so did a second Droid model. The Eris, from up-and-coming Taiwan manufacturer HTC, is half the bulk of the Motorola Droid, but it has two serious drawbacks: the charger port is so loose that if I even look at it funny the connection breaks, and the operating system is the previous version of Android. Eris runs version 1.5 of Google's open platform while Motorola runs the latest and greatest (for now), version 2.0.

There has been a lot of fretting over this in the tech press. Google apparently favors phone companies with the latest Android version in exchange for ... something. I read one story (which I can't find) which claimed that companies are afraid to publicly criticize this behavior by Google, which does sort of flout the whole open-source ethos of everybody all together.

And yet, despite the moaning and groaning about 1.5, despite the charger disconnecting (which is a big deal, as I'll get to) ... I must say I prefer the Eris over the Moto. It's not that the Moto is so heavy it hurts my wrists or anything. It's just that I know most of that added weight is going into a keyboard which, in my experience, is no better than a smart keyboard like that installed in the Eris. I'll let the video take it from there.

So Eris wins the battle of the Droids. But is it the best choice for me?

What I discovered is that I really, really like a pocket-sized Internet device. I was checking my mail with it, surfing the web, listening to Pandora (which played without so much as a hiccup for hours) ... and what all that usage did was drain my battery in record time. At first I chalked this up to my eagerness to try everything out and push my new toy to the limit. But then, as I moved on to other things, I found that even passive tasks, like running Pandora and listening for email alerts, would empty out my charge by noon.

This I found unacceptable. These are, after all, designed first and foremost as phones. And in my short time testing these models I was in two situations where I had no phone service because they had both run down! True, I still had my trusty LG Dare by my side, but if I switched to a Droid I wouldn't.

So that leaves a third option, one that existed before the Droids even came along: Use a basic cell phone in tandem with a smart wireless device. For me that would likely be the iPod touch. Presently 40% of iPhone OS devices sold aren't iPhones at all -- they're iPod touches. There are obviously a lot of people out there who want the software but don't want or need the phone service.

Those people are likely Verizon customers who don't want to sacrifice the ubiquitous range of the VZW network for iPhone cleverness. Incidentally, I took the Droids with me to western Kansas and I found that even on remote dirt roads, the recently acquired and upgraded Alltel networks offered pretty good 3G service, as advertised. Everyone I've run into with iPhones has professed jealousy at my acquiring a phone with many iPhone like features plus the one feature it doesn't have: uninterrupted service.