I haven’t owned an Android phone before, but I decided to give it a try as Saunalahti/Elisa (a Finnish telcom operator) provided a nice deal with an unlimited dataplan, and I needed one for my iPad. They even provided me with a micro-sim so that I could put the new sim into the iPad and use the phone with whatever sim I preferred (it was not operator locked). The phone, a Chinese thing called ZTE Blade, is an interesting gadget: it claims to have a 5 mega-pixel camera, but camera quality is pretty crappy. I have not yet managed to tweak the touch input into a setting that would really work well – either I am using wrong input methods (Android supports several), or the delay and sensitivity issues in the capacitive screen ruin the typing experience. On the other hand, Android links very easily with the Google services that I am already using, so my Google calendar and contacts were instantly synced as soon as I entered my account details. Gmail works fine, as well as Google Maps and other standard G-services. The standard browser is pretty ok, but since the WiFi is breaking down every hour or so (there is some reported bug in Android 2.1 in this, if I remember correctly), I try to avoid using it and continue to use my iPhone 3GS for pretty much everything online/Web. But: the phone is cheap (or free, if you are after the dataplan like I was), Android has a lot of different downloadable applications, and it provides more room for tweaking and hacking than iOS devices, for example. If that is what you are after, ZTE Blade might be an interesting thing worth checking out.
frans goes blog 