Thoughts on Android
Verizon kicked off Friday by releasing two of the hottest handsets available for the Holiday Season. The super hyped Motorola Droid ($299.00/$100.00 rebate), and the HTC Droid Eris ($199.00/$100.00 rebate). Both of these phones look solid. The Heavy lifter is the Droid, it has a huge capacitive touchscreen 3.7” WVGA (480 x 854 Pixels); 16.9 Widescreen, both on screen and slide out full Qwerty keyboards. It comes preloaded with a 16GB microSD memory card with support for 32GB.
The Droid sports Android 2.0 operating system for smart devices which is quite the operating system, it comes with the great new Google Maps update with turn by turn navigation and although it is in Beta it comes just like many other Google apps for the great price of free. I can hear the share holders at Garmin and Tom Tom gasping for air. I will post more about the great Droid in a future hands on review. Suffice it to say although it may not be what everyone wants to dub the next iPhone killer. Who are we kidding no one has dethroned the king. It is a great entry into the App Phone market as David Pogue calls it.
The HTC Droid Eris was also released on Friday and it is as you guessed it another Android device. If you look closely it looks like the kissing cousin to the Droid. But when you fire the Eris up you can sense the difference it has the HTC Sense UI tweaks, it runs Android version 1.5 and it has a slightly slower processor. The Eris looks like a great entry for someone not interested in all the heavy lifting the Moto Droid can do.
So Verizon has struck out and finally gotten into the Android world. Two great entries. it looks like that Verizon is downplaying the Blackberry Storm 2 in favor of the Droid. Which is in my honest opinion a big slam in the face to Blackberry. Sure Blackberry has made inroads of trying to branch out to the general consumer. But its still mainly aiming its might at the corporate world, and it falls short in the consumer space. If I had to make a bold prediction I believe the future is in the App Stores for each platform. It’s almost like the 80’s when PC operating systems were running everywhere. Finally Windows won out to the masses. Who will win between Android and iPhone. It may be that both Operating Systems come out on top, with the other players Blackberry, Windows Mobile, And Palm WebOS as the odd ones out.
