For the past several years, I've been an iPhone user. I got the original after it dropped in price, then got a 3GS when it launched. That makes it nearly two years old at this point, and it was showing, especially since the 4.3 update. As far as my AT&T contract went, I was at the point where the early termination fee would cost me less than an extra two months of service, so I started looking into phones. All rumors were pointing to a fall release of a new iPhone, and I'm not really willing to wait, so Android was the obvious choice. The immediate concern was getting out of the Apple ecosystem, which wasn't such a big deal since I have an iPad. I don't carry it around, but at least all my apps can still be used. (I've purchased very few songs through iTunes, and what I have is DRM-free, so that's essentially irrelevant.)
Looking into Android phones, I had a few desires: 1) stock or as close to stock Android as possible, 2) good developer support, 3) easily rooted, 4) physically not a whole lot bigger than the iPhone, and 5) not AT&T (AT&T has limited marketplace access amongst other annoyances - as a result, T-Mobile was similarly less interesting). In order, 1 has a handful of choices, all of which are part of 2 which covers a pretty wide variety of handsets, 3 knocks out Motorola and upcoming HTC phones, 4 kicks out basically anything with bigger than 4" screen, and 5 wasn't a huge issue.
The immediately obvious choice seemed to be the Nexus S, and slightly better, the upcoming Nexus S 4G. The problem with the former was T-Mobile, which is looking like I'll end up on AT&T in the future, while the latter is on Sprint, whose coverage is not terribly good nationwide (albeit perfectly fine here in the DC area). The 4G is also going to be $200 on contract, essentially making it the price of a brand new phone despite the fact that it's essentially a year old, being more or less a Samsung Galaxy S. The Nexus line is the phones Google designs itself, but manufactured by one of the major partners, and is intended to have the most up to date software. For reference, Android 2.3 debuted with the Nexus S in December, but phones are still being released brand new with 2.2, and a large number still haven't received official updates, which is really unacceptable when you realize that there's a large community of hackers putting out releases of 2.3 for a large number of phones, including some that have been abandoned by their manufacturers, for little to no compensation.
At any rate, I ended up with an LG T-Mobile G2x. It's maybe not quite bleeding edge, but it's pretty close, and on contract costs the same as the Nexus S 4G, and off contract is actually $200 less. I went with the latter option so I'm not tied to T-Mobile for two years. This also has the advantage of giving me a plan that ends up $20 less per month than getting the phone subsidized. It's a bigger initial outlay, of course, but if I keep it for 15 months, I break even, and come out ahead over the 24 month contract length, and the latter, at least, is pretty likely. My biggest complaint is that it comes with Android 2.2, but T-Mobile says 2.3 will be out "soon" and ignoring that, it seems to be very popular amongst the developer community, including the head of Cyanogenmod, so I'm not too concerned. Rooting it was a simple process that involved downloading the LG drivers so it could interface with Windows and SuperOneClick to actually perform the root. "SuperOneClick" is a bit of a misnomer since it took closer to three clicks, but it's obviously pretty simple - start it, click "Root," choose your phone, wait a couple minutes, click "Yes" to install Busybox, and then you're done. Physically, it's about the same thickness and width as an iPhone 3GS, but noticeably taller. It has a nice heft, but just enough to feel well-made, and has an attractive design to it.
As far as the OS itself goes, stock Android is pretty bare. There's tons of customization options, but on its own, it's nothing really to write home about. A simple bar with three buttons for phone, apps, and web browser, a search bar, and other than apps and widgets, no other customization options (although you can get a lot of functionality out of that). It's not terribly surprising that the manufacturers put their own UIs on top of this. I played around with the two big launcher apps - ADW and LauncherPro - and ended up sticking with LauncherPro. It's not free like ADW, but it seems to be a bit more functional. I've found things I both like and dislike about it when compared to iOS. When listening to music, iOS puts media buttons on the lock screen to skip songs and pause. Stock Android requires a download to do this. I ended up using Simply Lockscreen, which is a free, customizable lockscreen replacement that offers such things as a clock, media controls, weather (although that doesn't seem to be working for me), ringer options, and notifications. On the other hand, apps seem far better integrated with the OS, and not just Google apps. For instance, when Facebook is installed, it checks your contact list and updates all the contact information with Facebook's info, including photos. My biggest complaint right now is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to listen to podcasts at double speed. It seems like an odd complaint, but once you start doing it, it's hard to listen at normal speed. The best I can find is buying a non-free music player, but it doesn't really interface well with the OS since you end up having to search the phone for where the specific file is sitting if it's in a non-standard place, which describes my music since I use iSyncr to sync with iTunes (if for no reason other than that trying to find music to drag and drop among over 30000 tracks is way too much of a pain in the ass compared to using a playlist-based system with a robust search).
All in all, I'm still getting used to the phone, but it seems like I can get it to where it does what I want. There's still some things that are going to bother me, but it's definitely a really great mobile OS, that Apple can learn a few things from, especially the notification system. I've got until the 9th to decide if I ultimately want to keep it, and having ported my number to Google Voice, it's not really a big deal to switch to something else.
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