Enter Motorola’s Droid, a Verizon offering that represents the best refinement of Google’s Android mobile operating system to date. It doesn’t take long for it to prove that it’s better than nearly every other half-baked touchscreen phone out there.

But how does it stack up against the granddaddy of them all?

Let’s start with the basics. Droid comes with a 16GB memory card and sells for $199, though that’s after a $100 mail-in rebate. Apple’s 16GB model costs the same, though you don’t have to mess with the mail. Both require $30 per month data plans on top of the usual phone plan.

The Droid’s vivid screen is slightly taller than the iPhone’s, and the phone itself is a little bit thicker to accommodate the slide-out keyboard. Yes, you can use the physical keyboard at any time if you don’t like the touch keyboard, though the physical keyboard’s buttons are slick and don’t give much tactile feedback.

Navigating through the touch controls is smooth and easy, though Droid doesn’t support multitouch gestures like pinching. Everything is clean, convenient and easy to access, but as nice as the gestures work, they don’t recreate the same sense of fun that iPhone users get.