Day 1

First off, I lied about the SIM card. It goes under the battery and requires removal of the battery to install or remove.

The screen is beautiful. Comparing to the iPhone 3GS, the N1 looks sharp and vibrant, while the iPhone looks washed out and boring. The phone comes preloaded with a few apps on the main screens. I quickly figured out how to get to the whole catalog of apps installed on the phone. You can actually place an app on multiple screens. So maybe I'll customize one screen for work -- email, voice dialer, messaging, etc. And maybe one screen for walking the dogs -- email, Pandora, Twitter, etc.

There is a lot of talk these days in iPhone circles about how everything has to be done Apple's way to preserve battery life. If there's much/any truth to it, then Apple is a decade behind HTC in terms of efficient hardware. When the screen is on, there are "active wallpapers". I settled on the little pond, where the leaves fall and make small ripples, or you can touch and make big ripples. Completely silly, but that wallpaper is running in a Java virtual machine. It's not even machine specific code like apps on the iPhone.

Another thing the N1 does now is multi-tasking. I was surprised to find out that you don't actually quit applications on the N1. It will quit them for you when it needs to. So as I walked the dog this evening for an hour, I had Pandora pumping in Run-D.M.C. and the email app alerting me every 10 minutes of new messages. All that exchanging data over the 3G radio. I've been exploring the phone heavily since it completed its charge at around 3.30pm. It's now 10.30pm and I've got 40% of the battery left.

The camera has a flash, so it takes indoor and low light photos much better than iPhone. Not sure about the megapixels offhand.

Now the downside... If you use your iPhone for your own music, podcasts, and audiobooks, you're going to be instantly disappointed with N1. I need to look into Missing Sync from Mark/Space to see what they've done on iTunes integration. I looked in Android Marketplace for a good podcast app. I like my EconTalk and Jim Rome podcasts. Giant market opportunity!! The 5-star apps were impossible to figure out. That said, podcasts don't work well on iPhone if your podcast isn't in Apple's index. I can't get new episodes of the Jim Rome show on the iPhone -- I have to sync with iTunes.