Fundamentally, the main reasons I’m keeping it are that I couldn’t see a huge differentiator pushing me toward the iPhone, I didn’t really want to switch from TMobile to ATT (TMobile will unlock my phones for me and has said they don’t mind tethering apps), and I like the more open nature of the gPhone.  Assuming someone actually makes a tethering app at some point, it could save me and everyone at my company about $60/month, since we’d otherwise need to buy a separate device to get constant ‘net access for our laptops.

Here are some things I particularly like about the gPhone:

• The Status bar: I really like this.  I like one place for notifications and information, and a single consistent interface for all of them, along with my ability to either answer them or ignore them.
• The Dialer Application: I think this is great.  I don’t know that it’s a ton different from the iPhone’s, but I really liked this version.  I liked the previous calls list, the favorites list, and easy searching for contacts.
• The mid-call menu: I didn’t get a chance to try this out on the iPhone, but I loved this on the gPhone.  Press the menu button and you can enable/disable your bluetooth headset, switch calls, put someone on hold, and more.  Call switching and conference calling was astoundingly faster than doing so with any other phone I’ve had, which is pretty awesome considering how often I make conferences calls between myself, Andrew, and Teyo.
• Task switching: You can hold the ‘home’ button down for a second or so to get a list of the last six applications you’ve used, and you can switch right to the application without having to go to the home screen.  On the iPhone, you always have to go to the home screen to get to another application.  Welcome to 1987, people — this is MacOS 6, but with no excuse.  Android also has a Task Switcher application that just switches across all installed applications; it mostly sucks, but it’s encouraging that task switching is one of the first problems attacked in the OS.
• Notification lights: This seems like a small thing, but the phone has three small, colored LEDs; a green LED for message notification, a red light for low-battery, and an orange light for charging.  I really like these — they’re small enough that they don’t stab you like so many LEDs do these days, and they provide a great, simple way to know what’s going on with your phone, without having random vibrations every who-knows-how often.  I was using a friend’s iPhone, and it literally vibrated every three or four minutes without any indication why.  I’m assuming it was a notification I was supposed to track down, but there was no way to figure it out without going to the home screen and searching for red numers.
• Home screen vs. App Management: Android has a home screen with three panes, and you can arrange them however you want — apps, links to URLs, etc.  It also has an applications tab pull with every app on the system, arranged heirarchically.  This is great because you can set up a subset of your applications on the home screen, arranged how you want, and then you can peruse the whole app list alphabetically.  The iPhone, on the other hand, only has the home screen — you add more apps, and it adds more panes.  You apparently can’t change the four “most common” apps on the bottom, and there’s apparently no easy way to browse the apps alphabetically.

The combination of app management and task switching go a long ways toward making this phone feel more like a real operating system on a phone, rather than the iPhone which feels more like a phone trying to be a real operating system.  It’s weird, because I know the iPhone has a real OS under there somewhere; it’s just not acting like one.

I kinda like the keyboard, although I don’t know if it’s that big of a difference for me (I’m hopefully never going to be much of an emailer with my phone), and I like how responsive the phone is.

There are some things I really don’t like about it, though.  Browsing is a generally crappy experience — the zoom thingie completely blows, in that it inconsistently accepts touches and it’s just a crappy interface in general, and it’s also not-quite-impossible to actually click the links you want.  However, using apps like  Google Reader works fine, and I expect it will only get better.  And, again, this isn’t what I mainly expect to use the phone for.  It’s fine for stop-gap, like sitting in the Doctor’s office waiting room; it’s just not something I’d want to do a ten day trip with.

I’m pretty concerned about the durability of the hardware; I could already store my credit cards between the sliding screen and the keyboard.  Hopefully I’ll be able to replace the phone as necessary for the first year, and by then I hope they’ve got it figured out.

I do really wish the phone supported multi-touch, and with it the multi-finger gestures like the iPhone pinch.

I also wish there were just a Quicksilver-like interface for the whole phone — give me a single gesture to bring up Quicksilver, and I’ll never go to the home screen again.

An Aside

This is neither iPhone nor Android, but it must be said.  What is up with how unimaginative people are being with the touchscreen support?  Why is it that the only way to interact with either of these things is directly touching visible objects, or a traditional keyboard?  Where are my full-screen gestures that I can define, where are my accelerometer-based navigation, where, basically, is anything that really takes advantage of the form factor and touchscreen to be different?

The gPhone has pretty cool gesture recognition for unlocking — you get a grid of nine dots and have to make a specific gesture to unlock the phone.  Why can’t this same theme be used for, well, everything?  I’d like global gesture support for shortcuts to my most common applications, for instance — a Z to open one app, a loop to open another.  I haven’t seen a single situation where I need to drag in multiple directions without lifting my finger, so I don’t see what it would interfere with.

Both of these phones basically suck for context and task management.  Each phone has a “back” button, where the iPhone’s is on-screen and the gPhone’s is physical.  What?  A back button?  Back buttons suck in browsers, why would anyone ever think they make sense as the primary navigational paradigm in, well, anything, ever?  Sure, if you’re stuck in a completely linear world, sure, but on a phone where I regularly use 5-10 applications a day, and could conceivably use 20 or more, a back button just doesn’t suffice.

It bugs the hell out of me that people aren’t taking the Wii as their example — do something different, something weird.  If people aren’t laughing at your ideas, then you’re not trying hard enough.

Cheers.