Google-fueled Droid may be a contender against iPhone

Its window-shade metaphor — slide the top shade down for alerts, the bottom one up for apps — works well with the Motorola hardware, and the number of available apps, now more than 10,000, is steadily climbing. Android seems well on its way toward establishing itself as an important platform for developers.

Multitouch — the pinch and expand gestures that let you shrink or magnify what's on the screen — is missing from the Droid but apparently will be enabled for the non-U.S. Milestone version, which will be available from carriers including Vodafone Group Plc, Verizon Communications Inc.'s partner in Verizon Wireless, and Telefonica SA's O2.

The iPhone's margin in apps and its seamless user experience still make it the best smart phone out there. But the wireless world is big enough for more than one excellent phone; in the Droid, it has another.

Research in Motion's new BlackBerry Storm2 isn't excellent, but it's a considerable improvement over its predecessor. The original Storm, released a year ago, was the first BlackBerry without a physical keyboard, and reviewers savaged it: The New York Times memorably labeled it the “BlackBerry Dud” for its sluggish performance, lack of WiFi and buggy software.

BlackBerry Contender

The Storm2 fixes a lot of things, adds some new features and generally allows BlackBerry to at least figure in any discussions about touch-screen smart phones.

The most interesting feature of the Storm2 is a screen whose entire surface serves as a button, providing a tactile click when you press it, much like the touchpad on the current- model MacBook. (The clickiness goes away when the phone's off.)

If you're like me, you'll quickly banish the optional keyboard layouts that put more than one letter on a key. The touch-to-highlight, press-to-type system isn't half-bad, though it would take a lot more practice before I could match my speed on either the iPhone or a traditional physical-keyboard BlackBerry.

Positives for the Storm2 include WiFi (hooray!). Negatives are a clunky Web browser and many fewer apps than are available for the iPhone and Android devices. The Storm2 is available in the U.S. from Verizon for US$179.99 on a two-year contract, and in Europe and South Africa through Vodafone.

Finally, if you're old-school BlackBerry — as in, “I'll give up my physical keyboard when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers” — there's the Bold 9700, the newest iteration of the classic e-mail machine. Smaller and lighter than the previous Bold, it replaces the familiar trackball with a trackpad that makes scrolling easier.

The new Bold goes on sale this month from AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. for US$199 on a two-year contract, and from carriers including Vodafone and T-Mobile internationally. The T-Mobile version, for an extra fee, allows voice calls over WiFi networks.

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