Two things to keep in mind.
1) Someone comparing a new device to their old device (like I am doing here) is going to have a difficult time being objective about the differences between the two. Because that person (me) can't remember the details of the struggles they had when the old device was their brand new device. It's similar to end-user car tire reviews: when someone gets new tires, they always rave about how much more quiet they are than the old tires. Well, old tires are loud because a good deal of the rubber that was absorbing road noise is gone! So, yeah.
2) As you're reading this, pretend I wrote "to me" before or after all of my subjective opinions. It's really okay if you and I disagree on some of this stuff; it doesn't make either one of us an idiot, or lame, etc. Other things about your personality may, but not this.
Okay, enough philosophizing. Here we go.
Physical - what I don't like
There are three things that bug me.
1) Shape. Look at it straight-on from the top or from the bottom and you'll notice it is not rectangular - it is trapezoidal (ignoring the rounded back), the back being the longer side. So you get sort of wedgy pointy edges digging into your hand as you hold it. See?
Uncomfortable, silly.
2) Plastic. Probably a stupid fashion conscious nit, but I really wish the bezel around the screen was metal (I'm pretty sure it's a hard plastic). It makes it feel, well, plasticy.
3) Wakeup. There is only one button to "wake" the device (on the top). Would be nice if, say, the volume buttons doubled as wake up buttons. I'm sure there's an app for that.
4) Actually there are four things that bug me. The 4th is the recessed speaker grill... this is going to end up looking like the exhaust vent on the dryer before too long (i.e. lint stuck in all the corners) from carrying it around in my pocket.
Physical - things I like
1) Screen is lovely; physical controls are well done. People actually oooh and aaahhh when they see it. Not sure about the color cast, so I will look into color profiles to try to get it a little less green/blue.
2) Kickstand; well worth whatever space they sacrificed to hinge it. Just realize it's only for displaying/watching stuff, it's useless for interacting with the device (touch screen, phone falls over, kind of like the droids at the end of the big battle in what is laughingly called Star Wars Episode One).
3) "Home" buttons; I really like that they aren't mechanical. They also make navigating the device a lot easier. Now, ideally, they would be customizable (for instance I haven't used search more than once or twice). But they are very slick.
4) Heft; it seems to weigh exactly what it should weigh, given its size.
Usability - what I don't like
I'll start by enumerating what I don't like.
1) Phone widget. It's limited, and maybe I just haven't figured everything out yet, but one thing the iPhone does superbly well is the phone part of the phone. You have "tabbed" phone with contacts, "speed dial", keypad, voicemail, and missed calls all one touch away. With Sense/Android, these things are not well integrated. Since that's the main purpose of a cell phone I find this gap unhappy.
2) Voice mail + BlueTooth. Okay, honestly, how hard could this possibly be? When I'm using a phone function on the device and I have a BlueTooth headset connection (HFP protocol), use the BlueTooth device. Right? Right, but sorry! Playing a voice mail back through the visual voice-mail widget plays it on the ear-speaker. You can have it play on the external speaker, but not on the headset. That is just wrong. Workaround: call voice mail via the phone and of course it uses the headset. Wow.
3) Maps. Okay, the Google map app itself is very good. Navigation, layers, etc. all work very well and it's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY faster than my iPhone 3G ever was. However, there's one thing that bugs the hell out of me: zooming. There are predefined zoom levels, and they feel very far apart. Why? It's extremely irritating, even though technically it's a nit. I try to zoom in a bit and it zooms back out when I let go. So I have to zoom in a certain amount to get to the next "level," and then it's further than I wanted to zoom (which is why I zoomed to where I zoomed in the bloody first place, thank you very much). If in reality they're only going to support preset +/- zooming, there's little point adding multi-touch gesture support. Grrr.....
4) Contacts. I probably just haven't figured this one out yet, but I'm confused as there appear to be two sets of contacts. One seems to have come automagically from my Google account. It never asked me to sync (was enabled by default) and now I have this weird, not-really-connected-to-anything "contact" list with no phone numbers (because I use Gmail for, well, email - imagine that). But the contacts in this weird list show up, for instance, when I go to add a contact to a group from the phone widget. Since I have some phone numbers for the same people from "before" I now have many duplicate entries. That is annoying, avoidable, and annoying.
5) Gmail. Gmail is treated as its own app in Android... whereas other mail is setup and configured through the mail widget. From a consistency POV I don't like that. I've added Gmail as a pop3 mail client and I nuked all the Gmail icons. :)
6) Media Player. I find the media player mostly okay, but I wish wish wish it had integrated support for podcasts. I really like having audio control through a headset button, but from what I've found so far, some apps ignore it while others fight over it. This shouldn't be too hard - an integrated media player app that responds to headset built-in media controls. Are we detecting a theme yet? Starts with "inte" ends with "gration"?
7) Scroll. I actually like the scroll, but I wish it weren't so jerky. I'd rather it just skip some draws instead of stopping and starting as it scrolls (that's my impression of what is happening).
8) It's a more difficult device to familiarize oneself with. That is the nature of a more flexible device. And to be honest, there were several things I didn't "get" about the iPhone for days/weeks after I got it. Nevertheless, from a pure usability out of the box factor, the iPhone is significantly ahead. That's the upside of being ultra-controlling about your platform. The downsides are significant, and widely documented elsewhere. I'm not interested in joining that discussion. :)
9) Battery. It just doesn't last long enough when "idling". I expect to kill battery life when I'm using the device constantly, but when it's just sitting on the desk or in my pocket it doesn't last as long as I'd like. However, with a full charge in the morning I can easily get through my normal day. So this isn't a huge issue for me.
Usability - what I like
1) Fast. It's 10x-40x than my old iPhone 3G when doing anything data. Even on 3G it's 10x faster; on 4G it feels effectively as fast as a decent netbook. I can't emphasize this enough - since I'm out of the house a lot, the speed at which I can look stuff up, check my email, map something, etc. is very important. I am swooning at the usability of this device for my needs.
2) Fast. It task-switches ~immediately upon request. It loads apps in 1-2 seconds. It downloads and installs apps in seconds. It takes a photo when you push the photo button. It records video when you hit the record button. It plays media when you hit the play button. Seriously, all of these things on the iPhone included lag times of 2-many seconds, except for playing music on the iPod. "Task switching" on the iPhone in particular was horrible. Going from, say, Safari to maps was just plain evil. I timed it on many occasions and it was often 20+ seconds before I could actually display my location on the map (with no layers turned on). Even on WiFi it was very slow.
3) Screen real estate. The screen is large; easily large enough for browsing "real" (non-mobile) websites. Touch response is excellent. On-screen keyboard is also very good.
4) Zooming is super, except for maps (see above). When you zoom on a web page it actually adjusts the margins and text wrap. What genius thought of that (15 years ago)?
5) Customizationability (wow, cool word there Peter). I really love how I can set up one of the seven "home" screens to, e.g. control the many radios in this crazy device. And another one to house the apps I frequent most. I like how I can get to so many settings. I like the context-sensitive Menu button on the home row, once I thought to use it regularly.
6) 4G. Even though I find Sprint's 3G speeds much better than I saw with my iPhone 3G and AT&T, 4G is another big step up. You do need a reasonable signal to get this extra performance, but even with a weak signal it's fast.
7) "Cool" factor. I love e.g. the live wallpapers; I love the weather widget that rains on the screen and runs wipers when the current local weather is wet (which is most of the time in Oregon in June); I love that the clock hands move from 12:00 position to the current time; stuff like that makes me happy. Call me simple.
Summary
Simple summary: I am keeping this phone. Yes the iPhone 4 looks cool, but the larger screen, faster networking, and non-Apple (non-controlled) platform are big enough drivers for me to switch to Android. The dropped calls, poor 3G performance I experienced with AT&T, and the pricing of the plan made the decision to switch to Sprint pretty straight forward. So far I'm quite happy to move on with this smartphone in my pocket. If I could just get the lint out of there first....
Peter
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* I know that it's not fair to compare an iPhone 3G (not even a 3GS) to a new phone running on the latest ARM platform; my son has a 3rd gen iPod Touch, it's a lot more responsive than my iPhone. I'm sure the iPhone 4 will be plenty fast compared to the EVO 4G........ but the screen seems so tiny to me now. :)
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