Or, if you get tired of that, you could use one with Motorola’s interface, or any number of custom ones. You can customize it to do just about anything you want it to.

i recently purchased the n1 to evaluate it in my life and i used it for 27 days intensivly. i even purchased touchdown so i could sync with my outlook exchange server. i quickly realized two things about android. 1 is that google and the app developers really want your information in the cloud before you can see or use it from a device, be it your computer or phone. furthermore if you want to manipulate said data from your desktop you had to goto their servers/websites. take a simple to do list for example. i could use googles abysmal todo list or try a more robust list like astrid. if i wanted to acess that from my desktop i had to goto their website and be asulted with ads to do so. well i dont want distractions when i am manipulating my productivity. what if their server is down or my connection is down? i have to wait before i can do anything with it. this is a pain in the butt and a moronic design. the second thing i notice was that the FEW developers that were working on a desktop companion program with desktop syncing had to jump through some massive hoops to get it to work. some were horrible implimentations: had to manually transfer the most recently updated file to one system or the other for example. the ones that offered automatic wifi syncing are buggy at best. the platform seems to actively work against this type of thing.

this is why its a consumer phone. everything is designed to get you to visit their controlled environment where you are bombarded with ads. hell most of the apps are cluttered with ads. themselves thanks to admob. this is why its not meant for business users: we want to get things done quickly and effeciently. we dont want to be distracted with ads, and we dont have the luxury of hoping our data will be available the moment we need it. not every damn piece of information in my life needs to be on someone elses server. some of it, indeed most of it, is just fine on my computers/servers that I control.

Here’s what made this not biz friendly for me. My full time job uses Outlook – Mail, Calendar and Contacts. Android only syncs email out of the box. I have to use Google calendar and download a Google sync application to get the calendars to sync, but it only syncs if my computer is on. I missed 3 new appointments while I was traveling, because unless my computer was on it wouldn’t sync properly to the MyTouch. Then the Contacts. I had to export my contacts from Outlook and then import them on Google Contacts. Any new contacts I added to Outlook had to be manually duplicated to Google.

This was jut the beginning….

Now on the side I’m also a Freelance web designer. I have clients emailing me to a Pop3 account. With the Pop3 mail setup on Adroid, I was unable to open PDF files that clients sent me. This was a known issue at the time. I always had to forward to my Gmail or my Outlook account to open these! THEN, I used my gmail for personal mail. A friend sent me several emails with embedded images and they did’nt open in Gmail. I had to forward them to my Pop3 email account to get those to work!

I called Tmobile Customer Care almost everyday I owned the phone with issues. I visited the forums and joined a few Android groups to help me with my issues. In the end, I gave up and went back to my iPhone.

From I’ve been told you can buy an app that does the syncing with Outlook mail, calendar and contacts. But that costs $15. On the Blackberry, WM phone and iPhone it costs $0.

The mail is’nt the issue as much as the Calendar was. If you travel alot like me, it’s very important to keep appointments updated in real time. I shouldn’t have to open my laptop to have the Outlook sync with the Google app that syncs my MyTouch calendar!

I agree BB are not the ultimate business phone anymore. Personally the phone that has worked beautifully for both my FT job and my freelance job is my iPhone. I’ll spare you why I love that phone alot for my business needs, but I have yet to find a phone to get me to give it up. I’m hoping the HD2 will be close.