“There are much our two cultures can learn from one another,” is what I thought when I first picked up a Droid in a Verizon store in NYC in January. The OS UI is smooth and intuitive. With 2.0, Android introduced widgets, and with three customizable Home Screens, and an always-accessible notification bar at the top of the screen, Android was like a fully-stocked Jail broken iPhone out of the box.

All it needed was the apps to follow.

But let me go back a bit.

I bought a Blackberry Bold at full price when it came out. That was how enamored I was with the push email and limitless possibilities for browsing and media consumption that it offered. (Remember, this was a pre-iPhone age). I had been using a Pearl for around 6 months and caught intermittent whiffs of potential in its aging OS, its tiny screen, and its stilted input method.

In comparison, the Bold was a big, bad Shut Yo Mouth, and it screamed speed from app to app, destroying everything in its wake. Too bad, at the time, it was running OS 4.6 (thread less SMS, no ring-and-vibe, etc.) and the coolest app running on it was Viigo.

Fast forward two years, OS 5 is official, and the App Store has enabled developers to really push quality apps to the masses. The OS is mature, but in reality, it’s become a little fecund in its maturity: it does what it does (messaging) perfectly, but not much more. It’s not uncommon for a Blackberry pro to type as fast on its small keys as on his keyboard at home. It has reached the masses.

I will go into the extensive positives of the Blackberry OS in a future article. There are a lot of things BB does much better than both Android and iPhone. The obvious things are push email and messaging functionality. But for now…

Enter Android. (I have played extensively with the iPhone. This isn’t an article about the iPhone.)

Right off the bat, Android is a different animal. It incorporates multitasking, background notifications correctly, has enough apps to make any App Store user jealous, and perhaps the most important part of the equation, has Google as a force behind it, at all stops.

Reasons Android is better than Blackberry:

1) The Marketplace:

  • It just works. There are apps, you search for them, you download them, and you add them to your home screen. Some are good, some are terrible, some will brick your device. But there is no approval process and nothing stopping someone from creating the ultimate porn app. There are no moral quandaries here. This will inevitably bring more crap, but also give developers scared to get through the Great Wall of Jobs incentive to develop in a much more liberal environment.
  • Price. The Blackberry App World is on average twice as expensive as the Android Marketplace.

2) Made for touch: Yes I know that the current generation of Blackberry OS was never designed for touch: the first Storm proved this to be true. Even the latest OS5 updates do not add much in terms of browsing and speed. Android was designed to be used with touch, and it shows. You can push gently for one response and push harder for another. The built-in browser is HTML5 compatible, and it is dang fast. Scrolling up and down in menus is smooth (though not 3GS smooth) and browsing feels like a legitimate, albeit pared-down version, of its desktop equivalents.

3) Widgets: I can’t stress this enough, widgets are the new black. On Android, they sit on one of your three home screens giving you ready-made information to weather, RSS, email and anything else a dev. wants to come up with. I will be covering my favorite widgets in a future column.

4) Native Google integration: Yes, for some this is a very big minus, but I consider Google to be on the side of good, and sure, they’re basically using your personal info as their local advertising bank, but I don’t think they’re out to steal your information and use it for nefarious purposes. This isn’t a soapbox, but Google, like any other advertising company, uses your likes, dislikes, browsing tendencies and product choices to customize the advertising directed at you. Android is certainly not designed for advertisers, but its tight integration with Google products allows the company more control over those browsing tendencies and product choices. If you can get passed that, Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Maps, Gtalk, Google Voice, Buzz, etc., are all seamless and beautifully integrated, and if you already use their desktop counterparts, it’s smooth as butter.

5) Developer SDK: Now I am no dev., but from what I hear, developing software for Android is much easier than for Blackberry. There are already more apps in the Marketplace than in Blackberry’s App World, and that can be attributed not only to the open design (no review process for apps) but to the fact that geek devs want to design in an environment that fosters creativity and challengers minds to push the boundaries of the OS. Granted, most of the best apps for Android are currently iPhone ports, but that doesn’t diminish the apps themselves, and the speed at which they were released.

Most Blackberry apps are not pretty. There are some exceptions, but they are created for the most part to be functional. Poynt and Socialscope are notable exceptions that combine functionality with design excellence. But even the most basic Android apps are highly functional and easy on the eyes. Look to Twicca (a twitter app) or Fring (IM app) for example.

6) Browsing: Two words: it just works. There are no JavaScript errors, limitations of hiccups. While the 1.5-1.6 Android browser does not support HTML5, it is worlds above the native Blackberry browser (and Opera Mini and Bolt, though the latter improve the experience) in usability. The 2.0+ browser is comparable in speed and functionality to Safari Mobile on the 3GS, and while multitouch isn’t as smooth as the iPhone, on a high-res screen like the Droid or Nexus One, the mobile web is beautiful again.

Stay tuned to a future article for the benefits of Blackberry to Android, and another one comparing similar aspects of the two.

Have you done the great switch? Agree/Disagree with my thoughts? Leave a comment!