The iPhone is two years old, as of last Friday.

It has “screen cancer” at the bottom, often I cant see enough of the icons there to identify them, usually I remember or guess.

It’s as slow as molasses in January, sometimes.  I actually had it pause for 10 seconds after I did “slide to answer” on an incoming call, the other day.

So I’m looking into a new phone.  I want something with Internet access, email, and etc. I want something with a little more freedom in terms of app development and distribution. The  Apple App Store, and its Stalinist outlook, with regard to app signing, app censorship and public app denial, is not the thing. Several times, in the inquiry about a new phone, I have seen the number of apps available through the Apple App Store cited as a reason to keep iPhone. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, if you consider that about 99.9% of all Apple App Store Apps are worthless nonsense. It’s gotten too big to browse, and too cluttered to search. Bleagh.

The jail-broken side isn’t much better. The presence of Cycorder is a plus, but there’s just not much quality work in that arena, either.You can try to install gcc, but it’s missing libgcc, which hasn’t been upgraded past compatibility with iPhoneOS 2.0. I would really like to be able to compile a simple console program at the command line. but no avail. Python is there, but Perl isn’t. And they call it a “Smart Phone”.

Android seems considerably more promising, at least from the development POV. One isn’t constricted to the Android Market  (which has its own issues) as a place to acquire apps, and the ability to simply load your program and run it, without asking Steve Jobs for permission, make things nice(r). Python is available, and I have some minimal experience in Java, which is what one makes one’s Android programs in when one wants to share them on the Android Market.

It’s odd that the Android’s Market pretty much requires one to have an Android to see what apps are available — there are hacks on the web to work around this, but one would think that the Android promoters would want the iPhone toting community to see what they’re missing. What’s worse, the iPhone store has more apps in it, which is supposedly a major selling point for iPhone, but as anyone who’s browsed the iPhone store knows, those thousands of apps are dominated in numbers by WORTHLESS CRAP. I think there should be a non-worthless-crap counter for both stores, so that one could make an informed opinion.

I had the good fortune to use a demo Samsung Moment (runs Android) for a week, which solved two issues: 1) I chose Verizon-Moto-Droid, and 2) I got to see the Market unhindered. Lots of worthless crap there, but some useful stuff, too.

I noticed that my iPhone’s left built-in speaker is dead last night. Droid is due today or Monday…