I’m going to switch to Sprint, but my contract with TMO is expiring in Sep/Oct. In meanwhile i was using test phones which is inconvenient cause i have to flash them every week. Hence i needed tmo phone. The only one i want is N1. But i didn’t want to spend 530$ on a phone for network I’m going to leave. As weird alternative I’ve decided to go with iPhone 3GS. Reasons :

My experiment will be crippled by the fact that i’m using this thing on TMO network and EDGE connection( jb and unlocked ) and, because i’m gonna get rid of it in a month or two - i’ve put it in one of those ugly cases to preserve the state. I would never do it to any of my personal phones. Oh well, unless i go crazy and buy iPhone 4, then i have to, according to Steve Jobs. I aslo decided to stay at 3.1.3 and don’t go to iOS4

Let’s forget that Apple is a “nazi” company with horrible polices in place and their view of opensource is really questionable. They are gonna loose at the end because of all this bullshit, but today i want to review their final product same way i’d review a samsung microwave ( as example ).

First impressions ( my test everyday phone is EVO so i’m comparing to that ) 

Rooting/Jailbreaking(iPhone lingo)

Unlocking and jail breaking is major PITA. Community not as friendly as android and answers are harder to find. Could be the fact that i know where to look for android problems and there is always source.android.com. I did jb it with the Spirit tool at the end, cause i have 3.1.3 and new bootloader which makes it unjailbreakable with pwnagetool, or at least i couldn’t figure that out.

UI Framework - sadly iPhone little bit more intuitive . I though I’m gonna be very bad at navigating, cause all my buttons are gone, but I’m fine with few exceptions. UI itself feels faster and snappier. Nice transition and all. Also, in my view because they control UI, it’s one of the reasons it’s better. They don’t have HTC Sense/Blur/TouchWo/OtherCrazyMods things and crazy people putting hello kitty themes on that thing. So its basically its same if you compare Facebook to MySpace. Android right now is a MySpace which is sad. 

Fonts. I’m probably spoiled by EVO screen, but fonts are horrible on iPhone. Especially email/news things. HORRIBLE.

Applications.

If you compare stores - i think apple have better choice of good apps. But in general all apps i need are in both stores. iMDB only on iPhone for some reason. Exit store app once you click install - is total bullshit and very annoying.

I’m heavily rely on google solutions, gmail, voice, docs, reader etc. So my major concern was my life essential apps.

To my delight my contacts and gmail sync with 0 problems and i spent about 5 minutes to figure that out. Basically experience as good as in android phones.However , email app itself sucks. I find myself to go back to gmail web version more often. 

Another big thing for me is Google Voice which, as we all know, was booted out of app store. But web version works great ! Experience is obviously worse than on EVO with gvoice app, but still very decent. All other apps i was using via web interface anyway - so nothing changed here.

Preloaded apps calc/notepad/alarm/weather/stocks - are simple and good. Probably will satisfy 80% of people.

Camera is pretty decent. Better than mytouch/g1, worse than EVO

Browser

Hm all this pinch to zoom things work MUCH MUCH better on android. In iPhone if i zoom something i’m getting horizontal scroll bar and now need to move page in two directions. Very annoying. In android it page is always fit width and i scroll only up/down.

Maps - android with free nav wins hands down. 

Other apps i use :

SpringPad - awesome on both platforms.

Foursquare - same as SpringPad.

News apps - goal.com/huff,engadget - better on android due to fonts, larger screen on EVO and more real estate due to hardware buttons on the device ( you don’t need to put them as part of UI ). Also for most news apps UI is better on android for some reason. May be a habit.

Facebook - iPhone wins. Not like their app is exceptional as much as android version sucks and i’ve switch to use m.facebook.com on android, cause the app redirects there all the time anyways.

Twitter apps - tried tweetie( official twitter ) and Seesmic.  In my opinion both apps worse than on android platforms. I’m not sure why Scoble thinks they better. I’ve also use tweetcaster for android and it’s also better than both iPhone clients i’ve used. 

Games - i’m interested only in games for 3-5 year olds and there is better selection in app store at the moment.

Battery life since i’m only one day on it - it’s hard to judge, but i expect to see improvement of 1.5-2 x times over EVO.

If anything else i should try let me know.