Not Annoid With Droid Day 1

Just picked up my Droid about two hours ago, and I must say, I am pretty delighted with it. I started noodling with the Android 2.0 SDK and Eclipse plugin about a week ago, and started reading Ed Burnette's Hello Android but the real thing has been a little distracting. As I write this, the droid is sitting here, plugged into my Ubuntu Laptop, beeping quietly when I get a GMail and playing the latest Grails Podcast.

I had a chance to mess around with Sandeep's iPhone and while there are probably legions of Apple accolytes declaring a no-contest, this is clearly not the case. Admittedly, the 4 billion available iPhone applications do slightly outnumber the 10k or so for Android, I observed some similarities and differences.

1. The user interface is just as smooth in the Droid as it is on the iPhone. Granted, the iPhone UI has the elegance and sophistication of a Bahaus architected drawing room, but the Droid is every bit as snappy and has what I consider to be a more intuitive layout. That is to say, the Droid has a layout and flow that is more like a typical desktop, excepting that you have to swipe to move around the whole virtual desktop. (It was commented on somewhere that the Droid would appeal to technical folks. Not sure if this is what they meant)
   
2. The Droid's screen is large and bright and as unrefined as my finger motions are, I can still move my way around the apps.
3. The Droid is slightly thicker than the iPhone (and supposedly 1 oz. heavier) but I believe my pockets are rated up to 13 oz. past that weight. All the same, I am anxious to get some sort of case/protector for it but Dave from Madison Wireless said they got 15 Droids by UPS today, but no other accessories except a car charger. (So I bought one).
4. The strongest similarity between the iPhone and the Droid is my inability to type more than 4 characters using the on-screen keyboard without fat-fingering. This is where the Droid's corporeal keyboard really shines for me.
   

Spreaking of accessories, one thing I miss from the old days of cell phones (and I mean cell) was the availability of cradles. My first Motorolla phone had a very nice looking cradle which even had an analog display clock on the front which was an affectation I liked on my desk but had to give it up when I got the next phone as the power adapter changed. And thank goodness for that too. As I remember it, the Razor was the first Motorolla phone that implemented a power plug with electrical connections more than 6 microns thick.

I use my iPod cradle every day but none of the last 4 mobile phones I have owned supported this notion. You basically get a chintzy power cord and that's it. Anyways, although it is not available yet, the Droid has gone beyond the cradle, let me tell you, and will be shipping something they call the Multimedia Station which my research indicates the iPhone does not have. On the other hand, it turns out that the Multimedia Station is...... a cradle, albeit a pretty snazzy looking one.
The rest of the accessories are standard fare.

So the real topic of this publication is the narrative of Android development on the Droid, and sadly, I must report, it is not off to a good start, although I must also confess a total of about 17 minutes spent on it. It will be at least another 3.4 minutes before I head over to stackoverflow.com.

I was absolutely flying with pretty much everything. I got the Droid hooked up to WiFi with no issue. I bound the Droid to two Bluetooth devices, my Jabra Speakerphone ('cause those ear pieces just look silly) and my laptop. I plugged in the USB cable and the Droid announces both the connection and the Android Debug Mode activation, the setting for which my hawk eyes spotted as I was galavanting through all the menus while still standing in Madison Wireless waiting for Dave to finish up the paper work.

Then I fire up eclipse. Eclipse recognizes the device, or at least, he thinks its a device of some sort. However, Eclipse's description of the device pretty much mirrors my thinking exactly:

It's always the way when you're starting out on something new.