Bloomberg reports that Motorola most likely sold about 100,000 DROID handsets on the first weekend it was made available. These sales figures are pointing to a healthy growth of their business even though they still trail Apple in the market.
Bloomberg also reports that Verizon had 200,000 DROID handsets on hand and that stores sold about half their stock the first weekend. Motorola is targeting to sell about a million Android handsets in Q4 2009 including the DROID and other devices. One analyst says that anyone expecting the DROID to outshine Apple's iPhone on opening weekend had their goals set too high.
DROID Review
If you stilll haven't heard all there is to know about this gorgeous Motorola DROID smartphone, here's a full review with video of the handset written shortly after it came out of the market.
The Motorola Droid is something every gadget geek considers a truly lust-worthy Google-Android Smartphone. Motorola may have limited themselves on a few basics but their first Android 2.0 phone is definitely the most advanced and exciting device for Verizon today.
The Looks
The Droid is a big, industrial, even a little steampunk-looking contraption at 4.56 by 2.36 by .54 inches (HWD) and a hefty 5.96 ounces. The front is a bright, rich 3.7-inch, 854-by-480 LCD capacitive touch screen. Below the huge screen are four light-up, touch-sensitive buttons, and then a bit of a lip with the microphone on it. The back is burgundy soft-touch plastic. The whole effect feels pleasantly expensive, but also rather masculine; it's not androgynous or organic like the iPhone.Slide the screen to the right to reveal the first real disappointment, the Droid's keyboard. The QWERTY keys are a little too small, a bit too flat, and a touch too tight to put this in the first rank of keyboards. The Droid offers two decent touch keyboards as well, with word completion and correction. But even though it's a mediocre keyboard, it's much better than just having a touch keyboard alone.
The Droid's massive screen is perfect, because it shows the full width of desktop web pages. Everything looks better and more readable on the screen — e-mails, calendar items, icons, everything. But the real pleasure is turning the phone sideways and loading up a web page. (similar to iPhone, the Droid's screen rotates when you turn it.) Web pages no longer need horizontal scrolling, and if you have relatively sharp eyes, you can read everything. Double-tapping zooms easily, and scrolling around pages feels fluid. The Droid supports most JavaScript and DHTML, but not Flash or a few kinds of controls.
Speed and Power
The world's first Android 2.0 phone is also the fastest. This is the first Android phone with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, coming in the form of the TI OMAP 3430 chipset. That's an entire generation ahead of the ARM11 chips in all other Android phones. (The iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre also use Cortex-A8s.)
The Motorola Droid is fast to the point where responsiveness mostly doesn't become a distraction, which is a common problem on Android phones. Clearly, the droid is the fastest Android phone that I've tried. It is much better and reactive than the Cliq or than the HTC Hero. Out of the box, we're entering in iPhone 3GS' reactivity territory, but like other Android phones, it is not immune to slow downs once apps are running in the background which is normal. After setting up and having Exchange, Google Latitude and Skype running in the background, you can already feel that the user interface had slow down.
Droid has a graphics processor that is similar to the one found in the Nokia N900. I've recorded a video with a racing game (a "WipeOut" clone) to show you, but basically, OpenGL 1.x graphics can run at 30fps or more, so the machine has a level of performance that would allow iPhone 3G (and slightly above) type of games.
Running four publicly available Android benchmarks, on pure CPU measures, the Droid was about twice as fast as the Samsung Moment, which until now was the fastest Android phone available. The Droid was faster on memory and file system tests, too. Even network speed tests came out faster, because a faster processor can handle more data through the modem.
The result was pleasing performance in both built-in and third-party apps. 3D games Hyperspace and Speed Forge played very smoothly, with responsive controls. Web pages scrolled very smoothly. Applications launched with aplomb. But fast processor may also have some drawbacks like when programs would occasionally freeze or crash.
We're not sure how much of the performance boost is due to Android 2.0 and how much has to do with the hardware. If it is Android 2.0, how much impact will it have if older phones get an update? What's important is that it is faster and very usable - if you don't run too many apps in the background.
Voice Calls and GPS
The Droid may not be the greatest voice phone, but Verizon's excellent network helps cushion the blow here. Calls on the Droid sounded more muffled, compressed and more bass than usual. But call quality was still acceptable. The phone's speaker was loud at top volume, with slight distortion when listening to a very loud sound source. The speakerphone, a long bar on the back, was of average volume and quality. The Droid got an amazing 7 hours, 7 minutes of talk time, one of the longest so far for a Verizon Wireless phone.
Placing a call is very easy. You can dial a number on the (virtual) numeric pad, slide the keyboard and type the first few letters of a contact, or select one of your favorites. At the moment, you have to slide the keyboard out to type a contact name, so that's a two-hand operation (though technically you can do it with one hand, but not comfortably). Overall, all the basic voice call functions are covered very well.
The Droid auto-paired to our Plantronics Voyager Pro and Altec Lansing BackBeat mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets without a problem. But although calls, music, and video sounded clear, you can't do any voice commands—voice dialing or voice search—through a Bluetooth headset. You have to speak your commands directly into the microphone or a wired headset. That's a pity for a device with a dedicated Car Mode.
The Droid is the first phone to come with Google Maps Navigation, which provides free, turn-by-turn, spoken driving directions. Car Mode is a simplified interface that gives you a few large icons to poke at in your car; Verizon will sell a car mount for the Droid, as well. The combination may make the Droid the best GPS phone on the market.
Messaging and Social Networking
The Motorola Droid has a very good email support. Gmail is obviously there, and email in general should be easy to setup when using popular email services. If you use Exchange for work, there's Exchange support out of the box in Android 2.0. If you wonder, this is true "push email", just like Blackberry (and other) phones. I question the gray background design of the email app, and I sure wish that there was a way to customize it, but it is not a deal breaker. Having an email widget that shows the last 10 emails on the homepage would be great too. If you setup all your accounts in the Email application (that means not using a Gmail app) you can have a combined view of your Emails.
The Droid does social networking better than some phones, but not nearly as well as the Motorola CLIQ. Facebook contacts fold into your contact list, and the phone comes with both a home-screen widget showing your friends' statuses and a decent on-device client for checking and commenting on Wall posts. But Facebook IM and e-mail are entirely missing—there's no way to interact with either, unlike on the CLIQ. There's no MySpace or Twitter built-in, either. Ditto for AIM, Yahoo, or Microsoft Live Messenger; the phone only supports Google Talk. (Fortunately, you can find IM and Twitter apps in the Android Market.)
Multimedia
The Droid makes an exceptional music and video player except for one huge problem: it doesn't sync with PCs. Sure, you can plug it in with the included MicroUSB cable and drag and drop your media. But normal, non-geeky people don't want to do that. The freeware iTunes Agent helps somewhat, but Verizon needs to get their Rhapsody client on this phone immediately.
Once you get your music and video on the phone, it looks and sounds great. The Droid played WMA, AAC, MP3, WAV, and even OGG-format music files through wired or Bluetooth headphones, displaying album art. The standard, 3.5-mm headphone jack was very welcome. Full-screen MPEG4 and WMV videos played smoothly, although the phone crashed when it tried to scale down a 720p HD WMV video. The phone comes with a 16 GB microSD memory card that fits into a little slot next to the battery; you store most files on there rather than on the 210 MB or so of internal memory.
The Droid's 5-megapixel camera isn't as good as the competing HTC Imagio's, but its video camera is amazing. The camera hardware seems great, but there are focus issues with the camera application. Still shots looked grainy, with lots of color noise in low light. Videos, on the other hand, were 720-by-480 at 25 frames per second, just as promised; they make most other cameraphone videos look either tiny or jerky, and they'd play beautifully on a TV.
Conclusions
The Droid may not be the iPhone killer everyone anticipates but it's definitely a high-end smartphone that works very well and represents the best Android has to offer.
It's way ahead any other Android handset that we've had. As a phone, it is very good, and besides minor quirks, it is a very good communication device as well.
The Droid experience is very good and with all the right apps, it will definitely work for you. You get most of the benefits of a great touch phone, plus the benefits of a full QWERTY keyboard and an open OS. The Droid for sure is on its way to be a huge success for Verizon and Motorola.
Pricing: $200 with rebates and a new two-year contract.
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