To Fanfare and Hype, The Motorola Droid Launches

The Droid is the comeback product for Motorola, which was a high-flying company with its Razr product, but then squandered its chance as it failed to adopt 3G quickly and made several other mistakes. While it has also recently launche the Cliq device, it's the Droid that has garnered most of the attention.

The Droid is build on top of Google's Android platform. There have been other Android phones before, but the Droid is the first to run Android version 2.0.

New York Times columnist David Pogue has coined a new name for these devices like the Palm Pre, the iPhone, and Android devices like the Droid. Rather than call them smartphones, which he envisions as encompassing a cellphone with e-mail, such as an old BlackBerry, a Blackjack, and maybe a Treo, he wants them to have their own category.

These new devices, including the Motorola Droid, which include newer functionality including GPS, accelerometers, Flash support (Except the iPhone) in the browser, super-capable web browsers, the old venerable email, and app stores, should be called soemthing new. His name, and it's good, is App Phone.

The iPhone has become a hit even with its deficiencies, which include AT&T's network issues, no background processing, and a rather draconian application store inclusion policy, because it has 100,000 applications available to do most anything. As Apple says, "there's an app for that." Add in the applications for jailbroken phones and you have still more great applications. The Motorola Droid follows that path.

While Android devices like the Motorola Droid have many applications, its store is only about 1/10 as large as that of the iPhone. Still, with 10,000 applications, there are a variety to choose from.

Unlike the iPhone, the Motorola Droid offers background processing as well. That means you can run more than one application at once. While there are a few applications that can run in the background on the iPhone, the majority cannot.

For example, you cannot run Pandora and listen to music and get a phone call. You can't run GPS software like Tom-Tom's and get a call, either. That is, unless you jailbreak the phone and run Backgrounder, an app to enable that functionality.

And back to GPS, that's one of the most hyped-functions on the Motorola Droid. It's also one of the reasons Garmin's stock took a recent tumble. The Droid's Android 2.0 platform offers great GPS capabilities, something unmatched even by the iPhone, and challenges stand-alone devices like Garmin's.

Specification-wise, the Motorola Droid and the iPhone are very similar. The Droid has a slightly larger screen, but much higher screen resolution (854 x 480 pixels vs. the iPhone's 480 x 320). This makes text look clearer and smooths out edges.

The Motorola Droid has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and replaceable battery. These are both things the iPhone continues to eschew. It also has the aforementioned background processing, which Apple says will kill the battery life on the iPhone, and which, most people will say, is true (hence the replaceable battery).

The Droid is only 1.4 millimeters thicker than the iPhone: 13.7 versus 12.3, even with the slide-out keyboard and replaceable battery. The iPhone, however, is much more tapered in shape when you look at it, and feels still smaller.

Is it the iPhone-killer people say? Probably not. Many people switched networks to get the iPhone. Most of the early adopters of the Motorola Droid do not appear to be switchers, but loyal Verizon customers who waited for an iPhone alternative after hearing about the poor results people had on AT&T's network.

It is true that AT&T has been hammered about its network issues. It's undeniable that Verizon has a much larger 3G network. Does that mean, that if the Motorola Droid took off the Verizon network would be able to handle it, unlike AT&T and the iPhone? That's unclear. What is clear is that with the Palm Pre and the Motorola Droid, the "app phone" race is not a one-horse race any longer.