Last week at the Google IO conference they handed everyone a Sprint 4G EVO phone. It’s the third Android-based device I’ve had in my hands in the past seven months.

The previous two times I quickly went back to the iPhone.

This time the Android is sticking. Why?

Look at this thread of dozens of “pros” and “cons” comparing the iPhone to the Sprint.

But, really, a call I had with my boss said it all. I called him:

“Hello?”
“This is Scoble.”
“You’re not calling me on your iPhone, are you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I can hear you.”

I’ve now done that test with lots of people. Calling them first on my iPhone, then calling them back on my new Sprint phone. Every single one of them says “wow.” The clarity is so much better that it isn’t funny.

OK, that’s really not the reason I switched.

How about this?

Last night we went to a party 45-minutes from my house. Maryam was driving. Patrick was in the back seat with his iPad.

I turned on Sprint’s tethering feature. Easy to do, anyone can figure it out now (huge improvement in tethering UI).

Within a minute we were both surfing the web through the phone with nice speeds. I even watched a video as we drove down Freeway 280. I waved at Steve Jobs’ office as we went by and said “thanks for the iPad dude” but damn, is the Sprint phone cool. Oh, did I tell you we were using Waze while surfing? That we could listen to Pandora too? Multitasking rocks, but we’ve laid it all out in the pros-cons thread.

Apple, you have mobile competition now and it’s serious.

Anyone want to buy a used iPhone?

It’s interesting that lots of people who really don’t like Facebook’s privacy don’t get mad when journalists and bloggers put into public view Steve Jobs’ emails to them.

Today I got an email from Mark Zuckerberg, CEO/founder of Facebook. I am not going to be the one to put that into public view until he gives me permission to.

Why not?

1. Mark is a friend. Someone I want to have a long-term relationship with and I can guarantee you that if someone took MY emails and put them into public view they wouldn’t be trusted as a real-life friend.
2. If I start doing that, other people will trust me less. Even if I didn’t care about what Mark thought of me, I do care what other people in the industry think of me and I want them to be free to send me emails without having them show up on my blog without their prior permission.
3. If he wanted it in public he could have answered me in public, there’s lots of ways to do that, including at http://facebook.com/scobleizer

That said, I asked for permission to put the email into public view because I think you all should have access to the information in it. I’ll let you know later.

What would you have done with an email if Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg emailed you?

It’s amazing to me that people who are speaking up about privacy and Facebook, like Jason Calacanis, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis haven’t spoken out against having Steve Jobs’ emails taken out of a private context and printed in a public one.

If you don’t speak up for Steve Jobs’ privacy, what right do you have to speak up for your own privacy? Why isn’t that hypocritical? Just because CEOs are public figures and their emails contain information that would be of interest to the public?

Shame.

UPDATE: Zuckerberg gave me permission to print this email while I was typing this post:

Hey,

We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.

We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.

I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.

I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.

Mark

Here’s a screen shot of the email string:

Want to meet with me for lunch? You can go to Tungle.me/scobleizer and find an open spot in my schedule and schedule me. I’ll get an email and will be able to accept or reject the request or suggest another time. This is really a great new way to schedule meetings and saves me a TON of time. Tungle hooks into my Google Calendar and then puts the meeting on that, which gets synched to lots of other places including my calendars on my Android-based phones, my iPhone, my iPad, Microsoft Outlook, etc.

Plus they recently added hooks into Plancast, which is where I keep a list of the industry events I’m attending.

So when the team was in town recently I wanted to meet up with them to see what they were thinking about the future of calendaring and scheduling and whether they were thinking of even more links to other information sources like they did with Plancast. We met on the lawn inside Google’s headquarters, right in front of building 43, which I found was metaphorical.

Are you interested in saving time? You should try Tungle and you should watch the video.