Full disclosure: I’ve never used an iPhone (well, not for more than 5 minutes), but I do generally love Apple stuff (got 5 macs about the house).

I have been an Android user for about 18 months now. I started on a G1 and now I have a Motorola Milestone. For me the Milestone is the best phone I’ve ever used, just as the G1 was 18 months ago. But then a very large percentage of me is pure geek. I love features like the proper keyboards that the G1 and Milestone have, the ability to do command line stuff, run ssh clients and other geeky endeavours.

Having said that my other half is not even remotely geek and she gets on with it fine too. Maybe if she’d had an iPhone in the past she’d be looking at her android phone now thinking the UI wasn’t slick enough, but really it’s perfectly usable to her.

As an open source advocate censorship is important to me, and I don’t make the distinction between what I run on my phone and content I might view with my phone. Apple made the right move many years ago to switch their Mac operating system to an open source base, and allowing the user to have full access it. It means that people like me can easily build open source applications on OSX. They seem to have taken the opposite approach with the iPhone and tried to close it down as much as possible and censor the apps available to the user.

This is what stops me even wanting to try an iPhone – supposing I loved it, I might then want to use something that subscribes me to a more closed approach to the world. Bit of a dilemma there.

But I think there’s good news for both camps here. Mobile phone technology is very new, Android has improved a lot over the last 18 months (if you want proof then really you should try firmware 1.0 if you can even get hold of it it – it really *really* sucked). In the longer term things move closer to each other as ideas cross-fertilise, so Android is good for iPhone and vice versa.