Cooler or Smarter: The iPhone vs. The Droid

There will always be great rivalries in this world:  Yankees vs. Red Sox; Army vs. Navy; Skippy vs. Jif, and now the iPhone vs. the Droid.

I know what you are thinking: Everyone knows the iPhone is cooler.  All Apple products are cooler.  Apple has gone through a great deal of trouble to make us know that their products are for the cool crowd and anything else that comes our way out of Silicon Valley is for the dweebs of our society.  And this might be so, but I need to sound like my mother here and say, “Cooler is not always the best thing.”  I recently came across a technology blog, www.retrevo.com which gave a great deal of insight into the mind workings of both the iPhone user and the Droid user.

The blog focused on the apps that the two phone users purchased.  Could you guess that the top ten apps used by “iPhoners” were games?  Here are the apps in order of popularity: Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, Tiny Wings, Ninja Fruit, Where’s Waldo, Tetris, Words with Friends, Sims 3, Cut the Rope, and my favorite title – Plants vs. Zombies. At least this game sort of sounds scientific. Players have to use plants to fend off zombies – okay, it might not be scientific but it’s sci-fi and that’s sort of pretty close.

Now, let’s look at the Droid users’ top ten apps. First, before I list them, know that I have no idea what they are or why and how I would use them. The people who buy these apps are truly savvy when it comes to technical stuff and their knowledge goes beyond killing zombies. Here we go:  Beautiful Widgets, ROM Manager Premium, Root Explorer, Ninja Fruit (I guess serious people do play games, but there is fruit in the title so maybe they thought it was a nutritional app), Better Keyboard, Robo Defense (again, geeks love anything with robots), Set CPU, Weather Bug Elite (I never met a geek who was not into the weather), Titanium Backup Pro and finally, PowerAmp Full Version.

Does anyone see a difference in the personality of the two users?  It’s true from looking at the apps breakdown, I concede that the Iphone users are cooler, but it’s the Droid users who mothers will want their daughters to marry.  The Droid users will most likely be the ones earning a regular paycheck.  Why?  They are more serious minded. They focus on other things besides how to fling birds into walls to destroy pigs or how to find Waldo.  Okay, both the Iphone and the Droid have apps for the smartphone version of Scrabble, Words for friends. But it’s the Iphoners, who according to retrevo.com, jump on that app. And before you give them too much credit for wanting to improve their vocabulary, know this: The rules that apply to the real game of Scrabble do not apply to smartphone Scrabble, for in the phone version, nicknames and slang count. What kind of crap is that? There is no challenge to that. And I don’t know if this is true or not, but someone told me there were apps to help people cheat at the smartphone version of Scrabble.  See, how far can you get in this world if you need to cheat at smartphone scrabble?

It’s true that I might be profiling smartphone users, and I am sure that not all Droid users are smart and not all iPhone users are image conscious, but maybe, for big things like hiring someone for an important job or accepting a marriage proposal, we should say, “Maybe, but first let me see the apps on your phone.”  Yes, a quick glance might save us all a lot of trouble in the future.

photo by Droid-Life.com