The best way I can describe the transition is to read this article by Jason Kincaid and this article by Danny Sullivan. Danny contends that the iPhone is better, mentioning that after “literally an hour or less of playing with my wife’s iPhone” he was an iPhone convert.

I think both Danny and Jason are right in some ways. Like Danny, it only took me a couple hours of playing with my wife’s iPhone before I knew that I had to have one. In a post that I wrote in 2007 but never published, I said “I think the iPhone is going to be a monster hit.” And it was. But here’s the thing: I was comparing the iPhone to my previous phone, which was an LG enV. That was like comparing a Ferrari to a old station wagon.

If you’re coming from a feature phone (or almost any type of phone other than an iPhone 3GS), you’ll probably love Android right away. But if you’re already an iPhone power user? Well, you’ve learned how things work on an iPhone. Maybe you have your music in iTunes, and you’ve already built up a list of favorite apps. That makes switching to a different make of phone much harder. Jason Kincaid describes it well: “Imagine if you took a longtime Windows user and sat them in front of a Mac for a couple days.” Things seem weird and different in arbitrary ways, like the power button is on the other side of the phone. But those things fade away after a few days of using Android, and you’re left with a powerful platform that feels like it’s under your control.

Do I still miss a few things on the iPhone? Absolutely. For example, the iPhone makes it easy to take a snapshot of the screen — just press the power and home button at the same time. The iPhone fits 20 apps on the home screen instead of 16 on the Nexus One. I use a password for my phone, and the iPhone has a setting that says “If you’ve used the phone in the last N hours, don’t lock the phone,” while the Nexus One needs me to unlock it each time I wake it up. I prefer the default ringtones on the iPhone. I preferred the iPhone’s finance app for the news sources it showed.

But the Nexus One outshines the iPhone in other ways. Voice recognition built into every text box. Google Voice. And judging from the jitter in Google Sky Map vs. the iPhone Yelp Monacle Monocle, I think the sensors in the Nexus One are a little more robust. Once you use the high-resolution screen on the Nexus One, it’s hard to go back to the iPhone (and the screen on the Droid is very nice too). And I love kicking off a podcast in Listen and then multitasking in a web browser.

The iPhone is praised (rightly so) for its fit-and-finish. But glitches happen on the iPhone too. I went back to check on something a few weeks ago and the iPhone browser kept dying and kicking me back out to the home screen. Overall, I would still rate the iPhone higher on fit and finish, and the iPhone is simpler for a non-tech-savvy person to understand. But polish and simplicity aren’t the most important things to me as a phone user. I want maximum functionality, and the velocity of Android in that area has been staggering. Going from the G1 to the Nexus One in about a year is amazing. I can’t wait to see what new things show up in Android.

Ultimately though, what matters the most to me is control. I have a simple rule of thumb, which is that I don’t put data somewhere that I can’t get it back. That’s the reason that I didn’t buy songs in iTunes, purchase ebooks for the Amazon Kindle, or really log into Facebook at all. It’s also the reason that I recently switched my computer from Microsoft Windows to Ubuntu Linux. With Android, I feel like I have more control. It’s pretty easy to write your own programs for free. My contacts and calendar and email are sync’ed with Google, which lets me easily export that data. I can put widgets or folders or whatever I want on my phone’s home screen. And yes, I could install an app to wobble pictures if I wanted to. Why? Because phones are increasingly mini-computers with a phone attached, and I should be allowed to run the programs I want on my own computer.

I could ramble on about the iPhone compared the Nexus One (both really are great phones in different ways), but I’ll wrap up this post. But my 30 days with no iPhone is going so well that last week I started a new 30 day challenge. My new 30 day challenge is reducing my sugar consumption. I won’t be able to get to 0% sugar (even A1 steak sauce has sugar as an ingredient?!?), but I’m trying to stop eating sugar, candy, Splenda, and anything with sugar as a primary ingredient, even (sob) yogurt. You have to understand, I love yogurt. Wish me luck: only 27 more days to go. Sigh.

For the last few months I’ve been doing 30 day challenges:

- In May 2009, I walked 10,000 steps a day.
- For June 2009, I didn’t watch television for 30 days.
- For July 2009, I biked to work.
- In August 2009, I tried to read 15 books in 30 days. I only made it to twelve that month, but I knocked out three more later.
- For October 2009, I stopped using Microsoft software (both Windows and Office). That went so well that I’ve switched to Linux as my primary operating system.
- For November 2009, I needed something easy to do. I unsubscribed to Robert Scoble on both Twitter and FriendFeed. Robert is a fantastic guide to what’s new (and I like him personally)–if you’re just starting out there, he’s like training wheels to show you cool things. But back then he was going on about Twitter’s lists feature. It’s a fine feature, but I find talking about it as dry as dust, so I went Scoble-free.
- In December 2009, I went off caffeine.

So the question is: what to do for January 2010? Well, I’ve already been off Twitter for a week. I think I’m going to stay off Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed for the rest of January.

Do you have suggestions for other 30 day challenges I should try? If so, leave me a suggestion.

P.S. We have some new webmaster videos almost ready. Normally I tweet about those instead of blogging them. So if you want to hear when those videos are released, follow googlewmc on Twitter.

That’s right, I’m going Twitter-free for a week. I don’t really use Facebook, so that’s not a problem. The only other social networking website I use is FriendFeed, so I’m cutting that out too. To keep me on track this week, here’s what I did:

• Tweeted that I was doing the digital cleanse and changed my Bio line to mention that I was doing the digital cleanse.
• Removed all Twitter apps from my mobile phone.
• Removed the Twitter and FriendFeed shortcuts from Chrome’s new tab page.
• Hard-coded a bunch of websites so that I can’t even access them. In Linux, you can type “sudo vi /etc/hosts” and add the following lines:
  
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 friendfeed.com
127.0.0.1 www.friendfeed.com


  What these lines say is “Computer, when you try to use the domain name system (DNS) to resolve twitter.com to an IP address, hard-code the IP address to be 127.0.0.1.” Note that 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address that corresponds to your own computer. In essence, these entries make it impossible to browse to Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. You might need to reboot your computer too for the settings to take effect.

I’m thinking that I might blog a little more now that I’ve stopped tweeting for a week, so I’m doing one extra step–I’m linking my blog in Feedburner so that when I publish a blog post, it will tweet a link to that blog post. Here’s how to do it:
1. Log in to http://feedburner.google.com/ and click on your blog’s feed.
2. Click on the “Publicize” tab and then the “Socialize” service on the left.
3. Add your Twitter account and select the options you want. Here’s how it looks:

Then click “Save” and that’s all you need to do.

So far, I’ve been Twitter-free for twelve hours. In that time, I’ve
- worked out
- taken down our Christmas tree, chopped it into sections and put it out on the street
- typed in three months’ worth of data for a project that I’m working on
- taken down our Christmas lights and packed them away
- stored all our various Christmas decorations
- run a couple loads of laundry
- put out the trash
- gone shopping and had a couple meals with my wife
Oh, and written a blog post. We’ll see how the digital cleanse works for the rest of the week.

For October, I’m not going to use any Microsoft software. No Microsoft operating systems (WinXP, Vista, or Windows 7) and no Microsoft Office allowed. I will continue to use their keyboards, because they make very nice keyboards, and I will allow myself to use their websites–sometimes I need to do a query on Bing to test how well they do, for example.

I don’t plan to switch to Apple, although I might try a Mac for a week. Apple products are polished and usable, so why not switch to Apple? That would be a much longer blog post. Apple makes great design decisions for the majority of people, but if you don’t like a particular decision, it can be very difficult to change it. Have you ever wanted to see the exact time (including seconds) on an iPhone? It’s hard to do, and I’m that kind of guy. Another big reason is just that I’m huge believe in free and open-source software, and I want to support that sort of software.

So on Friday I installed Ubuntu on my Windows XP laptop. On Saturday, I downloaded all the data from my pedometer (the software only runs in Windows) and shut down my home Windows XP machine. I already had a machine running Ubuntu at home, but I managed to get it driving two out of my three monitors:

What have I learned so far? The current version of Ubuntu (called “Jaunty Jackalope”) is really quite nice. There’s a lot of polish to the UI and the day-to-day tasks work very smoothly. At the same time, it’s possible to tinker around with something so much (I’m thinking about fonts right now) that you mess things up. But the dev version of Chrome for Linux has been really fast and stable, even though Chrome for Linux isn’t officially supported yet. I spend a large chunk of each day in a web browser, so having Chrome as an option was critical.

I’ll let you know how the 30 days turns out, but right now I’m optimistic.

This month is really busy with some internal Google projects–don’t worry, not related to webspam–so I’m not planning to do a new 30 day challenge this month. I have kept biking in to work and I’m enjoying it more lately. I think I’ll enjoy biking even more after I bling my bike out with the full-color LED lights I bought from MonkeyLectric at Maker Faire. Here’s an image from MonkeyLectric’s gallery to show you what they look like:

I have to say, they’re a big step up from my Tireflys, which are just LEDs that stick on the stem valve of your bike tire.

For the month of June, I tried to walk 10,000 steps a day. I learned that a walk in the evening is a nice way to wind down and relax.

For the month of July, I biked into work. I learned:
- I don’t much like to bike to work. Part of it is probably that I have pretty old/crappy bike that doesn’t change gears quite right. The fastest path to work is on car-dense road, which also isn’t much fun.
- For the iPhone, I found a program for $3 called MotionX-GPS that does a very solid job of recording times and GPS tracks.
- But the best program I found was for Android. It’s called My Tracks and it’s free. It’s better than MotionX-GPS for a couple reasons. First, in addition to “total time,” the My Tracks application also tracks “moving time.” In other words, if you’re stuck at a traffic light, your “total time” keeps counting but your “moving time” doesn’t. Second, the My Tracks application can easily upload your GPS track to a Google Map.
- I can tell a notable improvement in my fitness level. It’s deeply satisfying to shave a few seconds off my biking time every day.
- The easiest way to improve your speed is to ensure that your bike tires are fully inflated.
- I get hungrier when I bike to work. I can also eat more without gaining much weight.
- Google has a program that lets bike-to-workers earn donations for their favorite charity.

After biking to work for July, I ended up doing a short sprint triathlon (swim 400 yards, bike 11 miles, run 3 miles) this past weekend. I did it in about an hour and 20 minutes, which I’m pretty happy with–especially with my crappy bike.

For the month of August, I’m shooting to read 15 books in 30 days. I’ve only read 6-7 books so far, so I’m behind, but I figure I’ll read 15 books and if that takes a little while longer, no biggie. I love to read.

Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or not, so why not tackle something new?

I’m just now wrapping up an effort to not watch any television for 30 days. I started on May 22nd (right after all the season finales finished). I learned that other than a few times at night, I don’t really miss the television–and I ended up reading a lot more books. I’ll still watch some TV after this experiment, but I think I’ll watch less. I also noticed when I watched TV after a month off that when a pizza commercial came on, I started to hanker for pizza. Search ads have wonderful, trackable ROI–but branding ads can be effective too.

So now the question is: what project should I attempt next? I wrote down a few ideas ranging from hard (read 15 books in 30 days) to near-impossible (no email for 30 days). I’m curious to hear what you think I should try:

If you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments!