Hooray! I can tell you that I like my Android phone more and more every month, and that's been the case since I bought my G1 in December of '08.


I think you've correctly identified the best phone on each carrier, though it's hard to say if the Droid X is significantly better than the Incredible. I think it depends on what size phone you want, though the HD video recording and HDMI out are also additional features on the X.


Again, you're right on that one. AT&T f___ed up the Backflip, which was a pretty bad phone to begin with. The Aria is supposed to be pretty nice, but it's not in the class of the phones you mentioned. I will point out that if you are looking at the Nexus One off-contract for T-Mobile, there's also an AT&T version available. But if you're looking for service in SF, I guess you know their capabilities better than I would.


Obviously, I LOVE my Nexus One. It's a speedy little devil and it does everything I need it to. I must admit, however, that those larger screens have definitely tempted me. Right when I bought my phone, rumors of the Evo were coming out, and that huge screen was attractive to me. In the end, I stuck with my N1 and I'm not sad I did. However, if I lived in a current 4G city I might feel differently, so that might be a consideration for you.

It also depends on what you need. For my business, having the WiFi hotspot feature built into 2.2 is a great asset, and as of now I haven't had to pay extra for it.

As long as I'm talking about 2.2, lets talk about software updates. I don't know anything about what the Google employees are carrying, but what I do know is that my phone isn't tied to any carrier, and so I can get updates as soon as they're pushed out. Also, the Droid X and the Evo 4G have Motoblur and Sense UIs, respectively. This means that Motorola and HTC have to update their UI in order to work with newer versions of Android, therefore delaying when you'll be running the latest version of the OS. At some point Google is supposed to divorce the proprietary apps (GMail, Calendar, etc.) from the OS so you can update them separately, but I suspect you'd still miss out on other OS improvements, the likes of tethering, hotspot, and JIT.


The new devices right now have bigger screens, but I believe they're all at the same clock speed at the moment. Most are running on a Snapdragon 1GHz chip. I don't think anyone is on that 1.2GHz dual-core chip they showed off at CTIA.


My apologies, but this is where I don't know much, as my wife and I are on different carriers, and it never made sense for us to be on a family plan anyway, due to our usage cases.


I never send text messages, and I even told T-Mobile to block all texts coming into my cell number, but I can get completely free text messaging to and from my phone, thanks go Google Voice! For the RARE times I do text someone, it's nice to have it, and maybe I'll start using it more now that I'm not paying $500/MB.


They do, oddly, seem to be the ones knocking it out of the park these days in regards to having the hottest phones, which is bizarre given their history for having the worst phone selection around!


So that's about all I can think to say at the moment. Sadly, I can't speak much to your wife's side of things. I really need to get caught up on the feature phone side of the market...