IDG News Service — Google's (GOOG) Android mobile operating system proved a formidable rival to the wildly popular iPhone in a recent real-world test.

Android will overtake the iPhone in sales this year, according to an IDC forecast released Tuesday. IDC predicts that by year's end, Android will have a 16 percent market share worldwide, compared with the iPhone's 15 percent. Symbian will continue to lead with 40 percent, and the BlackBerry platform will hold on to second place with about an 18 percent share, IDC said.

Trying out a Motorola (MOT) Droid 2 on Verizon Wireless alongside my own AT&T iPhone 3GS over the past few weeks, I found Android a tempting alternative to the iPhone platform, though there were surprises on both sides.

Even leaving aside the improved display and other advances in the latest model, the iPhone is a remarkably easy device to use. It's far more approachable than the Droid 2, which runs the latest Android operating system, Version 2.2. Yet Apple's simpler user interface presents some limitations.

The most obvious additional feature the Droid 2 has is its physical keyboard, which feels well-made, with a nice sandy texture and good-sized keys. Yet it takes some getting used to. Whereas a virtual keyboard like the iPhone's can redraw itself in several modes, the Droid's physical keyboard requires an ALT key to activate numerals and some punctuation marks. Those marks appear in blue on the black keys, and at handheld scale, it can be hard to tell the punctuation marks apart. The phone also has a virtual keyboard, but although it's well-sized in landscape mode, the Droid's narrower screen becomes a liability when it's flipped to portrait mode. Then, the virtual keys become too small to easily use.

The Droid also falls short in its general screen design -- out of the box, at least. The seven panels of the homescreen were cluttered with large, ungainly widgets along with some smaller icons. In a "drawer" that's pulled up by touching an arrow at the bottom of the screen were several dozen more icons. The iPhone's screen, by contrast, has just one level, unless the user adds folders. It also comes with far fewer built-in application icons, and those icons are bigger and more attractive than the ones on the Droid.

However, with a bit of work, the Droid's central homescreen reveals its advantages. The widgets can be removed. And taking a frequently used icon from the drawer to the main screen requires nothing more than pressing it for a few seconds and watching it reappear on the main screen. To send it back, there's a trashcan icon that appears on the main screen when an icon there is pressed for several seconds. On the iPhone, once a user has tapped into the vast App Store and filled up a few extra screens with new icons, getting the most important ones on the main panel requires a whole series of displacements, like a slider puzzle.

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