iPhone or Droid?

Since my previous GSM-based carrier was recently bought by Verizon, they were nice enough to send me a free blackberry curve (an upgrade over my Pearl) in order to continue to use their CDMA service. However, I am not impressed with the feature set of the 8830 (still using the older Blackberry 4.5 OS) over my previous Pearl. Since i do not see this as much of an ‘upgrade’, I am currently smartphone shopping. Currently have my sites set on the Motorola Droid or Apple’s iPhone.

I’ve got to admit, I really .. REALLY like the service that Verizon offers. However, in my particular market AT&T doesn’t fair too bad. The videos and reviews that I have seen so far hasn’t quite sold me on the idea of the Motorola Droid. It just doesn’t seem as polished or clean as the iPhone. I’ve been a happy owner of the iPod Touch for the past two years and do have some investment in a couple of apps. It seems that the iPhone’s biggest advantage over the iPhone is the App Store. When you hear about major developers actually scaling back Android development efforts in favor of the iPhone, it is easy to assume that the iPhone’s lead will only widen.

The iPhone’s achilles heal is the network. Yes, I mentioned the network does fair well in my area. However, I am a good 50 miles from 3G and am rarely in that area. So, it is hard for me to imagine that shelling out that kind of dough, when I’ll rarely get the 3G benefits, worth it.

In order to make a fair assessment, I am heading to a Verizon store this week to hopefully get a hands on with the Droid, and perhaps even the HTC Eris. If you have experience with both the Droid and iPhone, let me know what you think!