photo credit: Stéfan

When Google launched its panoramic photomapping service back in 2007, it was the first time many netizens had the chance to explore a swathe of detailed street-level photos from their armchairs.

In the U.S., Street View’s rivals now include Microsoft’s Silverlight-powered “Streetside” via Bing Maps and MapQuest’s 360 View. Elsewhere in the world, other international sites offer rival photomapping for their particular part of the globe, even as the reach of Google’s Street View steadily increases.

We’ve picked our five favorite websites from around the world that offer extensive street level imagery from places as varied as Munich, Mae Hong Son, Moscow and Miskolc. So grab your Panama hats and get ready to hit the virtual sidewalks of streets many, many miles away, then let us know your favorite services in the comments below.

City8

There are a number of Chinese services that offer street level photography of the country, with one of the first being “virtual tour” software designer Easypano’s City8. It claims to have beaten Street View to the web by a year.

City8 currently offers fairly comprehensive imagery for more than 40 Chinese cities, however, navigating the site can be a little tricky unless you read and speak the lingo, which sadly, we don’t. The photo maps won’t display if you’re viewing the site through Google Translate (in Firefox anyway) so you’ll have to navigate back and forth (or go for a dual screen option) to find out what you’re looking at. However, the photos of everyday China are fascinating so it’s definitely worth the hassle if you have an interest in the People’s Republic.

NORC

NORC’s photo mapping services cover Eastern and Central Europe. Currently, you can see landmarks and parts of cities in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Russia (Russia is accessed via a separate site — Mappi).

Luckily for those not blessed with multi-lingual skills, the site is available in English, making zipping round the back streets of Innsbruck, Austria a breeze. NORC ups the value by making most map views available as 3D images — if you have the correct glasses. You can identity which maps are 3D by the glasses icon on the top left of the display.

MapJack

Mapjack.com offers a slightly random mix of imagery from a few select areas on America’s West Coast and parts of Thailand.

“What others have done with NASA budgets and Star Wars-like equipment, we’ve done on a shoestring budget, along with a few trips to Radio Shack,” the site claims.

Those Radio Shack trips were worth the effort however, as Mapjack’s image quality exceeds that of Street View with particularly clear, bright scenes and vivid colors. We recommend Mapjack for seeing crisp photos of the Yosemite National Park and for soaking up the brilliant street scenes of Chiang Mai.

SightWalk

This German website offers street level photos of Bonn, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart. Thankfully it’s also available in English.

We were quite impressed with SightWalk’s option to share locations with your social circle via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. It also overlays map data with points of interest along with Wikipedia links (which are in German).

The site is easy to navigate — we were headed down the Potsdammer Platz within seconds of selecting Berlin from the homepage — and the imagery is in decent quality.

Yandex

As Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex started a photographic index of Eastern European cities starting with the biggest ones: Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Kiev. It has just recently expanded to also offer panoramic views for Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Chelyabinsk.

The service is in Russian, which can make navigation fairly difficult, but the clarity of the street maps (designed by the geek legends of Art Lebedev Studios) make the site less of a challenge to use.

Whether you want to see the exotic roofline of the the Kremlin as it appears from the street, or view the brutal tower blocks that pepper the cities, Yandex is a great place to go, especially considering Google is yet to get its camera-equipped cars across the Russian border.

BONUS: VideoStreetView

This is a bonus site because it actually offers 360-degree panoramic videos. In a nutshell, this Swiss firm has recorded footage as it drives down streets, and as you watch the clip you can pan around at will, looking left and right, up, down and even behind you. The commercial possibilities for panoramic video are really quite exciting for lots of different areas and industries, so be sure to check this out to see what the future might hold.

Microsoft rolled out its free Office Web Apps earlier this week, introducing a free, basic Office suite for the web. How does it compare to Google’s own Docs offering? Here’s a rundown of each webapp’s strengths and weaknesses.

Where Office Web Apps Excels

Yeah, yeah, that’s a pretty bad pun. But it’s actually the first descriptor that came to mind.

Microsoft Office Compatibility

As you’d probably expect, when it comes to uploading a complex Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document to the web, and having it look the same there as it does on your desktop, Web Apps takes the cake. Until our little test, though, we didn’t realize by just how much.

We uploaded a few different Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to both suites, and relied on our past experience with Docs. To show you the difference, here’s a heavily formatted corporate-style newsletter-pictures, sub-headings, margins, you name it. We opened it in TextEdit on a Mac, and placed it next to both Google Docs and Office Web Apps.

First, here’s how it looks in Google Docs, compared to the original in TextEdit. (Click the image for a larger view):

Not the same, but you might also think, not too bad, right?

Compare that to Office Web Apps’ version:

Honestly, until I saw the online Office version, I didn’t even know there was supposed to be an image at the top. There’s a larger argument to be made about open data formats, along with the sub-argument about rigidly formatted newsletters sent out as Word documents. But if tricky Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are a regular part of your online life, Office Web Apps has it all over Google at the present moment.

Font Selection (on Windows)

Another undiscovered quirk of online office suites until today: font selection. When you load Google Docs in any browser on any OS, you get a fairly small but standard set of fonts to choose from, shown here.

Load Office Web Apps on a Windows system, though, and you seem to get full access to all the fonts installed on your system, for both content creation and reading documents with specialized fonts. (Click the image at left for a larger view). That might not matter to everyone, but for those to whom fonts are a pretty big deal, Office Web Apps seems like a more convenient framework.

Storage Space and Access

Where Google offers universal access and constant iterative features for its online apps, Microsoft competes with raw storage space. 25 GB to store whatever you need—including pictures, audio, and video for use with your docs and presentations—is nothing to sneeze at. And a number of crafty coders have devised ways ofmounting SkyDrive to make it just like any drive. Suddenly, Google’s heretofore generous 1 GB of Docs upload space doesn’t seem quite so impressive.

OneNote

If your life feels incomplete and disconnected without Microsoft’s powerful note-taking, doc-organizing, and life-arranging tool, then you’re going to want to get into Office Web Apps. It’s not the full-scale version, but you can add, view, and edit your OneNote data in fairly clean form, so that’s something you’re going to either love or not quite understand what the fuss is about. Jason loves OneNote, and gets things done with it. You might feel the same.

Where Google Docs Still Rules

Google’s Docs offerings have been on the market a good four years now, so they’ve had more time to learn what users want and need in an online suite. It shows in the design and function of Docs for day-to-day users.

Interface and Organization

Not that either webapp is particularly pretty, but Google’s system of nested folders, tags, and powerful search takes the cake over Office Web Apps, which is deeply tied into the Live.com ecosystem, laid out a bit like Hotmail, and generally harder to get around if you’ve got a lot of projects. Simply adding some color coding would help out Office’s layout quite a bit, instead of relying on the beige folder icons that are the norm of Windows apps.

On top of that, Office Web Apps’ landing page usually sticks an ugly ad in the lower-right corner, one you’re probably used to seeing on the sites of newspapers that have lost touch with their advertisers, blogs hungry for monetization, and other hey-whatever ad sections. It’s less than appealing, especially when the design seems to blend into the beige-ish focus of Live.com’s design. (Note that you can change your Live.com theme, but the ad doesn’t ever go away).

Sharing and Collaboration

In terms of real-time collaboration, Google wins hands-down, because Office offers none. You can share documents for editing and viewing, and the controls are actually quite good for doing so (as discussed further on). But Office is heavy-handed when it comes to editor lock-in—switching between laptops in my own house, I was often locked out of documents because Office considered one “Open in another account,” even when I’d shut down the other computer. Google Docs, on the other hand, has recently added Wave-like, real-time collaboration, one my wife and I have used to plan a vacation together on a single document with surprisingly few conflicts. Both apps tie their document sharing into emailed requests and grouped contacts on the Google/Live.com servers; Google’s implementation feels a little more easy to grasp.

Speed

Google Docs feels pretty fast when you’re editing, uploading, loading new documents, and even editing presentations with images. Office Web Apps constantly bugs you to install Silverlight for a “faster experience,” and doesn’t exactly churn and crank after you do install it. Google’s certainly got the lead in cloud-based architecture and coding.

Google Integration

Let’s face facts: Far more people are enthusiastic Google users than Live.com fans. That wouldn’t matter so much, except that among your friends and coworkers, it’s more likely forthem to be enthusiastic Google users, and have a Docs account, and know how to edit a Docs file, than they are likely to have a Live.com account and know their way around Office Web Apps. It’s a first-mover’s advantage, and an issue of scale, but it’s still there, and worth noting.

Where Docs and Web Apps Tie

For some types of users, a difference between the two webapps won’t be a win/lose item, so much as a difference in taste.

Access Control

Google does a decent job of letting you choose exactly who can view and edit your documents. Office does a surprisingly similar good job, but with a different tool—a sliding scale for each document, setting it to totally public and open, only available to you, available to groups, particular friends, and other stops in-between. If your life is loaded into Gmail and Google Contacts, Google’s contacts and groups might work better, but Office Web Apps has a good system, too.

The Interface

We’d love to be so sophisticated as to call a winner here. But in all honesty, both Docs and Office Web Apps have pretty utilitarian interfaces, and whether you like one or the other is going to depend on which camp you fall into: the minimalism and keyboard-friendly realm of Google, or the ribbon-ish look of Office, where everything is a button. Neither web tool is meant for all-inclusive utility, and both seem to have stuck to the basic functions of font, spacing, and layout in their buttons.

On Monday, Apple officially unveiled the iPhone 4. After playing around with it for 20 minutes or so after the keynote, I can safely say that it’s the most impressive mobile device I’ve ever seen. But plenty of people (many of which have never used the phone) disagree. Their arguments are mainly predicated on what Apple didn’t include rather than what it did.

But what those people fail to understand is that this is exactly what makes the new iPhone (as well as the previous iterations) so solid.

During his keynote address on Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted that while Apple may not be the first to release features, they do so in a way that’s the best implementation.

Many people view this as absolute bullshit. But what that implies is that they think Apple simply cannot get features done in time — or that they will not do them for some reason. I have a hard time believing either of those is the case.

Jobs cited the iPhone’s cut, copy, & paste functionality as one example of Apple getting a feature right. I have to agree. For two years, everyone complained (myself included) that Apple didn’t have this functionality. Could Apple have done it sooner? Of course. But would it have been half-baked? Probably. Just look at how it works on other devices — or maybe I should say: look at how poorly it works on other devices compared to the iPhone. Most Android phones want you to use that damn ball to select text. Or worse, those arrow buttons at the bottom of the EVO’s horrid keyboard. It’s a nightmare.

Another popular example is background tasks (or multitasking). This feature is finally coming to the new iOS 4 after being on other devices for a few years. So was Apple dragging its feet out of incompetence? Or were they being stubborn? In their view, they were waiting to perfect the system that would not destroy battery life. Android’s background method is supposedly similar to what Apple will use, but it has issues (see: the EVO).

Most people haven’t yet seen third-party apps running in the background with iOS, so it’s hard to know exactly how well Apple has done here. (And I only got to play around with one app, Pandora, running in the background for a few minutes.) But a few developers I’ve talked to who have used the system say it’s by far the best combination of functionality and battery-saving techniques that they’ve seen. One told me that it basically doesn’t ding battery life at all.

In March of last year, I reported that I had heard from sources that Apple was talking about ways to bring background tasks to the iPhone. Even though it didn’t happen until now, by multiple accounts, Apple was working on it at the time. It’s just that it took Apple this long to perfect the system.

Most companies, seeing their competitors already doing something, would feel forced into releasing their own solution as quickly as possible. Not Apple. And I suspect this ends up being a big benefit for the users.

But those are things that currently now work on the iPhone or will soon be working. What about newer features that Apple left out of iPhone 4 (and iOS 4)? Here’s a list of 10 things from eWeek. Some are ridiculous (for the millionth time: Apple is not going to do a physical keyboard — nor should they), and some are just clearly (and sadly) not going to happen (Google Voice). But a few are things that come up somewhat regularly.

One is 4G support. The main problem here is that the iPhone is still exclusively tied to AT&T in the U.S., and AT&T has basically no 4G support yet (they have enough problems with their 3G support). If Apple made a version of the iPhone that worked on Sprint’s network (which recently rolled out the EVO 4G), then maybe we could talk — but they don’t.

More importantly, I’m not even sure we’ll see a 4G-capable iPhone next year. As Apple proved with the first iPhone (which wasn’t 3G despite 3G being fairly ubiquitous at the time), they care more about the overall experience than about being the first to have a nice-sounding feature. Users laughed at the notion that 3G capabilities severely dinged battery life — until the iPhone 3G came out and that’s exactly what happened.

With 4G, by all accounts, the battery ding is even worse. Also, 4G is still slowly deploying around the country, and some carriers (read: AT&T) won’t have it really deployed for a long, long time. In other words, don’t be surprised if next year Apple still doesn’t have a 4G version of the device. Everyone will bitch about it, but in Apple’s view, it likely just won’t be worth it yet.

Another feature brought up is over-the-air (OTA) updates. While eWeek seems to specifically be talking about OTA firmware updates (does anyone really care about that so much?), the more pressing issue is the ability to sync things wirelessly on your iPhone. Currently, you can only truly do that with certain MobileMe elements (like Calendar, Contacts, etc). But in his post a couple days ago, my colleague Jason Kincaid brought up his disappointment that over-the-air syncing of things like apps and music wasn’t in iOS yet.

This is a fair point both because it would be very useful, and because it’s baked into the latest version of Android, 2.2. But we have yet to see exactly how well this system with work with Android 2.2. The on-stage demos at Google I/O were impressive, but it probably wouldn’t have been made into a demo if it weren’t. The proof will be in the real-world usage of this feature.

Apple is clearly thinking about how best to do this as well. Jobs said as much during the D Conference a few weeks ago, and Apple has even blocked applications that do something similar (a sign that they’re likely working on it — and that they don’t want third parties touching the iTunes/iPhone sync interaction). Make no mistake: this feature will be coming to the iPhone. And I would bet it will be here next year. And if Apple is able to get its iTunes-in-the-cloud service off the ground in time, it could be a lot easier than people are thinking right now.

The point to all of this is that one of the things that makes the iPhone great is that Apple is so deliberate and meticulous in the features they choose to focus on and implement. Could Apple include more features? Of course. But anytime you try to do more, you take focus away from the key things you want to get done. It’s something that’s so obvious it almost needs to be restated.

It’s the same reason why startups that focus on creating as many features as possible often fare worse than those that focus on a few key ideas. The ones that keep it simple are able to execute much better. Apple (which likes to think of itself as the “world’s biggest startup”) is no different, and the iPhone is a testament to that.

The conspiracy theorists will say that Apple holds back features to be able to sell more devices the next time around. I believe it’s much less about that, and more about focusing on a core group of features that matter the most — and nailing them. Judging by both sales figures and customer satisfaction reports, the strategy is working. And the iPhone 4 — even without 4G, OTA updates, a physical keyboard, etc, etc, etc — will prove that once again.

HTC’s Evo might be the last phone running custom software on top of Android that you should even consider buying. Because the whole trend of skinning Android has become a horrible, dividing mess.

The problem with an Android phone running a phone manufacturer’s homebrew software, like HTC’s Sense or Sony’s TimeScape, is well known: You’re going to wait a lot longer to get the freshest version of Android. That wait wasn’t a big deal in the past. And considering Android’s grander ambitions, I’m not so sure fragmentation is as big of an issue as some would suggest (which Google will tell you). But as of Android 2.2, you should still think a bit more deeply about which Android path you’re going to walk down.

The Problem with Custom Skins

They’re awful. HTC’s Sense interface was widely regarded for making Android better when it showed up on the Hero a year ago. Well, Sense is the exception, not the rule. Some truly hideous atrocities have been committed in the name of Android, like Samsung’s Behold II. Not every skin is quite that offensive, but even what I’d consider the average, like Sony’s interface for the Xperia X10, is cloying and confusing; with the Evo, even Sense started to feel a bit tacky. The point should be to make Android sexier and easier to use. They don’t.

Android’s caught up. As of Android 2.2 Froyo, there is basically nothing any of the custom interfaces do that Android doesn’t. A year ago, Android lacked a great many things, from social networking powers to decent Exchange support to remotely accessible settings. HTC’s Sense filled in those massive gaps, once upon a time. But now Android juggles multiple calendars, smoothly integrates Facebook and Twitter into contacts (more seamlessly than any of the custom skins), lets you quickly access settings from the home screen, and even has built-in Wi-Fi hotspot powers. At this point, none of the custom software builds add killer features anymore.

They’re too slow. A corollary of the above point: Not so long ago, Android was behind the best of the custom interfaces. But now, Android is evolving so quickly, it not only caught up, it’s zooming past those meddling with its software. Frankly, the custom interfaces need to innovate faster to make themselves worthwhile—as it is, it seems pretty likely that the next stock version of Android build will be superior to anything phone makers can offer (in fact, I would argue that 2.2 is already). But think about it: How likely is it that hardware companies are going to be able to keep up with Google, who finally seems to have hit its stride with Android?

The reasons to buy an Android phone with customized software have effectively dissolved. They don’t look better; they don’t work better; and they’ll hold you back from getting the latest and greatest updates from Google, possibly by many months. Most people don’t care or even know that their phone really is a computer, meaning it can actually get better via the magic of software updates. But if you’re reading this, you probably care. Android 2.2 is a markedly more excellent experience than 2.1. The best stuff at this point seems like it’ll come from Google, so riding the bleeding edge of Android is the place to be, more now than ever.

Maybe that’ll change in another year, if Google slows down their release cycle as drastically as Android chief Andy Rubin says, to just once or twice a year. Which will be kind of a sad moment when it arrives—the thrill of Android, at least for geeks, is how fast it’s moving. But that’s when it’ll be safe to jump on the slow road. Until then, I’ll be sticking with the official, (probably) annually released Google phones.

Recent  Apple keynote was, I think more than ever, a testament to Steve Jobs’s presentation skills. Faced with an audience that had already seen the grand finale, he still had no trouble evoking plenty of gleeful gasps and applause. He even managed to make the now-infamous Wifi glitch amusing and entertaining (if a bit odd), rather than painfully awkward.

But despite all of his showmanship and a very impressive new product, the keynote wasn’t quite the game changer that I expected. I don’t mean to say I found the iPhone 4 to be disappointing — it will be incredibly successful, and many of my friends are champing at the bit to get one. But I expected to walk out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center yesterday longing for the next iPhone despite my current allegiance to Android. That didn’t happen.

A few weeks ago, an Apple zealot emailed Steve Jobs asking him if Apple had any WWDC announcements that would “blow [Google] out of the water”.  Jobs responded, “you won’t be disappointed.”  To me, it sounded like Jobs was hinting at something major — a feature or service or device that was simply so much better than Android that it would feel like the G1 vs. iPhone 3G days all over again, when the iPhone was vastly superior.  But instead of launching a nuke, Apple’s announcements were a strong but survivable offensive against Android; a retaliation for the recent attacks at Google I/O. Apple has taken the lead once again, but I don’t think Android will be playing catchup for long.

Before I go any further, I think I should explain where I’m coming from so as to cast aside (or perhaps, affirm) any suspicion that I’m simply an Android fanboy. I used an iPhone full-time for two years, first with the original iPhone, and then the iPhone 3G. I loved both of them, and for a long time held a rather naive view that Apple couldn’t do much wrong. Then, in mid-2009, Apple started blocking Google’s applications and I began to have serious misgivings about the App Store. A few months later I switched to a Droid, and then to a Nexus One, which I’ve been using for around five months now. Despite my issues with the App Store, I bought an iPad the day it came out and was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying it was “changing the paradigm of how we will use computers” (a ridiculously clichéd choice of words, but I still agree with them). Of course, my decision to buy an iPad may indicate that I’m a huge hypocrite, but I like to tell myself that I just have a nuanced perspective.

All of that said, let’s get down to business.

The Device

It’s been said many times already, but it’s worth repeating: this thing is gorgeous. It unapologetically abandons the older iPhone’s curves in favor of more defined edges that make the thing just look inherently powerful. And, perhaps more important, it feels rock solid.

One of the first questions I posed to the Apple sentry stationed next to my demo unit was how resistant the new model was to scratches and falls. His response: “the screen is stronger than sapphire”. A quizzical expression later (I know nothing about gemstones), he explained that this meant it was really strong and would be very difficult to crack. After holding the satisfyingly weighty device for a few minutes, I honestly got the impression that I could throw it against the wall and that it would survive intact (the sentry did not like this idea). I really haven’t seen an Android phone that felt this sturdy or looked this good.

Aside from the build quality, the most striking feature of the iPhone 4 is undoubtedly its screen. It’s sharper than your computer monitor. Reading text on it feels a little surreal, like it is almost too crisp because you’re not used to seeing this kind of display on a phone (a nice problem to have). Again, this blows the screens I’ve seen on Android phones out of the water. If I had to guess, I’d say the Motorola Droid comes closest, but doesn’t match it.

One related note on this: switching between the iPhone 4 and original iPhone screen is a little jarring — as Steve Jobs said on stage, once you’ve tried the “Retina Display”, you can’t really go back. Unfortunately, the iPad features a display that is most decidedly not the Retina Display (in fact, it has a lower pixel density than the older iPhone models). In other words, your shiny new iPhone 4 is going to make your 2 month old iPad feel obsolete real fast.

iOS 4

Amid all of the announcements yesterday, I think I was most surprised by the lack of news around iOS 4, which made its debut in April and will be released later this month. Granted, this is a huge update, bringing multitasking, threaded conversations in mail, folders, and plenty of other goodies to the iPhone. Thing is, Android already does most of this — I had expected a major feature or two that we hadn’t heard about yet.

Multitasking is clearly the big news here, and yes, there is an argument that the iPhone may be able to get better battery life than Android in this regard. But my Nexus One typically makes it all day without having battery issues, and the ‘rogue application’ phenomenon simply hasn’t been a major problem for me (I think it’s affected me twice). And the iPhone still has a a lousy notification system, which I don’t think is as usable as Android’s slide-down tray.  In short, this just seems like a matter of preference.

FaceTime

This is the wildcard for me. Apple’s execution here is good — you don’t need to deal with user accounts or setup of any kind, which is very nice. But it’s not perfect. The biggest issue here is that it’s Wifi only, which is going to be pretty restrictive. Apple’s marketing videos around this feature are truly touching, but ensuring that those heartwarming moments happen within Wifi range is going to be tough (not to mention that you’ll need to make sure your loved ones are all equipped with the newest iPhone).

Of course, this will change in time — carriers will eventually be able to accomodate the increased video traffic, and obviously the market penetration of the iPhone 4 will be increasing quickly. But that will also give Android plenty of time to catch up, especially given that Apple is making FaceTime an open standard (though the logistics of this haven’t been publicized yet).

My hunch is that FaceTime will be a major marketing win for Apple and that it will keep going strong with those heartstring-tugging ads. But I’m less sure that people will actually be using the feature regularly in the immediate future.

Other Software

A significant amount of time during yesterday’s keynote was dedicated to showing off iPhone applications. I don’t think any of these will have a major impact on the success of either platform, but they’re worth going over.

Zynga’s Farmville

• This is going to be an absolutely huge draw for millions of Farmville addicts. That said, my hunch is that the demographics for Zynga games are more in line with the iPhone than with Android to begin with. If you really wanted to, you can likely get Farmville working using Android’s Flash support.

iMovie for iPhone

• This is the kind of application that Android simply doesn’t have yet (or at least, I can’t find): polished and powerful. Given how terrible the stock Android media player is I don’t have high hopes for this sort of thing coming from Google, so we’ll probably have to wait for third parties to develop something comparable.

iBooks

• Jobs spent a lot of time talking about iBooks, namely its ability to now read PDFs and to sync between multiple devices. Note that Amazon’s Kindle app is coming to Android this summer and will feature similar syncing capabilities.

Outlook

After handling the new iPhone, there’s little doubt in my mind that my Nexus One is no longer the state of the art. The screen isn’t nearly as sharp as the iPhone 4, the build quality isn’t as good, and I don’t have a front facing camera for video chat. Most of these shortcomings hold true for other popular Android devices like the Incredible and Evo 4G (though the latter does have the front camera).

But despite the fact that my phone doesn’t quite match up to the iPhone 4, at no point yesterday did I consider jumping back onto the iPhone bandwagon. My Nexus One doesn’t feel much slower than the iPhone (especially since upgrading to Froyo). I can’t see myself using the phone video chat in the immediate feature, especially given the Wifi limitation and the fact that I’d only be able to use it with other technophiles initially. And while the iPhone 4?s screen is pretty damn amazing, it isn’t nearly sharp enough to overcome my disdain for AT&T.

What’s more, I’ll be surprised if Android devices don’t surpass the iPhone’s hardware capabilities within the next four months or so. We’ll probably be seeing sharper screens, faster processors, and even integrated gyroscopes (another feature launching with the iPhone 4) on the next wave of devices. And from a software perspective, Android actually seems poised to start beating Apple on some fronts, namely its connection with cloud services. Despite rumors leading up to WWDC, Steve Jobs didn’t once bring up Apple’s MobileMe cloud service during his keynote. During his interview at the D8 conference he said that Apple was working on wireless tethering/sync features, but it seems like Google has a head start.

In short, more than ever it looks like Android and Apple are in a dead heat. And that’s a great thing for all of us. Even you fanboys who didn’t read this far.