Introducing Bickford Blogs

I have played around with a private, family blog but now plan to expand and start writing about a number of issues - mostly related to technology - that I find fascinating.

First topic: Droid and iPhone comparisons

In September of 2009 I went to England to visit a list of friends, including Jonathan and Sue Payne whom I had first met at Sun many years before.

Anyone who knows Jonathan knows that he is a very binary person when it comes to his passions. Either he doesn't care about something at all or he has a very strong opinion.

Jonathan is passionate about the iPhone and Macs.

Over dinner in The Best Pub in Hamstead Heath, drinking the Greatest Ale (Belgian I think) and having Possibly THE Best Hamburger in the UK, I was educated on the issues.

After I left their house I knew I had to order the Macbook Pro (15") that I'd been thinking about and also get an iPhone.

The iPhone part was harder. For several years I'd been grinding my teeth, pretending to be happy with my Motorola Q (Verizon), and I just couldn't bear it any more. Although I didn't particularly want to move to AT&T (remind me to complain about the US carrier model), I decided I might need to at least have two cell phones or bite the bullet and move completely to the iPhone.

I was just about to pull the trigger when the DROID was announced. How had I missed that? I guess I hadn't been reading engadget regularly for a while. My new Macbook and the DROID arrived less than a week apart.

Meanwhile, I hadn't completely forgotten Jonathan's lectures. I decided that I really did need to understand the iPhone experience. Even though I'm not working in the app or device space, I do love gadgets and I do love what I would call remote, scalable computing.

So I bought an iPod Touch (32 GB). I figured I didn't particularly need the phone aspect, or the camera. I did plan to use it for voice (e.g. Skype) so I wanted the better Touch, but I was primarily interested in understanding the app model and how it operated as a platform. A week after the DROID arrival, I had the Touch.

Although I find I do like some applications on one platform better than on the other and so forth, most of my posts will be on the computing models and platform issues with each approach. The apps may provide great topics but aside from volume for the iPhone / Touch, most of the apps I am interested in are available on both platforms.

Of course, the platform model war could ultimately be won based on winning the app battle, so I may weigh in on some of those issues as well.