Obi Ezechukwu‘s blog High-Octane Java recently featured the post Compact Equals, which compares an implementation of a Java class’s overridden equals method in traditional form versus one implemented ...
It's not terribly clean, but you could use indexOf() and check if it returns -1. Better than breaking out a loop.
If you are fortunate enough to be using JDK 7, the newly available Objects class is the obvious (at least to me) choice for implementing the “common” Java object ...