On Friday, November 6, Verizon released their first phones running on Google’s Android 2.0 operating system: Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris phone. As I went to my local Verizon store I noticed that there were no long lines, in fact there were only two other people besides me who went in the store. Verizon has been heavily advertising this phone, as the “iPhone killer”, and mocking the iPhone for not having a lot of basic features that the Droid has. Is the Droid really an iPhone killer, and is it really worth it? Continue reading to find out. I  got the Motorola Droid, so I’ll be reviewing that phone in this post.

Browser: The browser on the Motorola Droid is very nice, and in my opinion it beats the Safari browser on the iPhone. Just like the browser on the iPhone and on the Palm Pre, it uses the same Webkit engine. The Droid will get Adobe Flashplayer early next year along with the Palm Pre, while the iPhone won’t be getting it any time soon. You can double tap to zoom in or zoom out of a certain section on a web page. Unlike the iPhone or the Palm Pre, multi-touch is not enabled on the browser so you can’t pinch to zoom in or zoom out. The reason I’m saying enabled is because the Droid does support multi-touch but Google has not enabled it for some reason. I hope they do this in the next update. Scrolling through web pages on the Motorola Droid is very fast and smooth, unlike the iPhone there is no checkerboard background when you’re quickly scrolling through web pages. Holding down a link on a web page brings up a menu that shows you the URL the link leads to, and gives you the option of opening the link in a new window, bookmarking the link, saving the link, sharing the link through E-mail/Facebok/Gmail/Messaging, or just copying the URL of the link. Almost every website  I go to today has a favorites icon that helps me identify which tab  I have it open in, and the Droid’s browser displays the favorites icon for each website you visit. Neither the iPhone, nor the Palm Pre does that. When you open multiple windows in the browser, you can easily find and switch to the Window you want to go to. With the iPhone or the Palm Pre, you need to slide your windows left or right and find which one you want. The browser supports copy and paste, you can tap the “Select text” button from the menu, select your text, and it automatically gets copied to the clipboard. You can bookmark websites and save them to the Bookmarks menu or save them to your home screen. All the bookmarks in the bookmark menu display a screenshot of the website that you bookmarked and the title. The browser also has a “Find on page” feature that allows you to enter in some text and find a certain keyword you are looking for on a web page you’re viewing, unlike the iPhone. The browser also allows you to speak and search on Google without having to type what you’re searching for.

Multiple apps: One of the big features of the Motorola Droid is that it can run multiple apps. The iPhone can only run one application at a time. The Palm Pre can run multiple applications, but it lags whenever I have more than one application open. I was actually surprised when I opened multiple applications on the Droid, there was no lag and I was able to quickly switch between other applications without any problem.

Android Market: The applications store on the Droid is called the Android Market. You can download free applications without having to register an account, but you must register an account with Google Checkout in order to download paid applications. While browsing the Android Market, I downloaded the top Twitter application (Tweed) and noticed that the interface of it wasn’t that great compared to the interface that most of the iPhone apps use. The iPhone App Store has a lot of better applications than the ones found on the Droid, and it definitely has better games as well. If you are a games person, you definitely don’t want to get the Droid, there is no game on there that is worth buying in my opinion. Downloading applications from the Android market was a better experience than downloading applications from the App Store. I was able to download multiple apps without having to exit the Android Market application and I was also able to check how much percent of each application was downloaded. On the iPhone, I have to manually open the App Store application each time  wanted to download a new app.

Keyboard: The Droid has a physical keyboard with a D-Pad and a virtual keyboard. Typing on the physical keyboard wasn’t easy at first because the keys are flat, but after trying it a couple times I am now used to it. I prefer to use the virtual keyboard though, it’s easier to type on that. I wish Motorola hadn’t included a D-Pad on the physical keyboard, otherwise the keys would have been a little bigger. Typing on the virtual keyboard was very easy, but I did tend to make more mistakes than I did when I typed on the iPhone. The iPhone’s virtual keyboard is still the best.

Camera: Despite the Motorola Droid having a 5.0 Megapixel camera, it’s camera is no better than the iPhone’s camera. It can take videos and pictures, but the quality of the pictures isn’t that great. The camera application also tends to be slow or even freezes at times. I’m pretty sure that this is a software issue and it will be fixed in the next Android 2.0 update.

Customization: You can easily customize the icons for the applications you download, the theme of your phone, or even add widgets. iPhone users don’t have much customization options without having to jailbreak.

Conclusion

As of right now, the Motorola Droid is the best and fastest phone running Google’s Android 2.0 operating system. I liked the Motorola Droid, and I’ll definitely be keeping it over the iPhone. Why am I doing this? It’s on Verizon’s network, which is far more reliable than AT&T, it supports multi-tasking, the browser experience is great and it will support flash, and the screen size of the Motorola Droid is bigger than the iPhone. As a previous iPhone user, I will miss the games that I downloaded and played but I will also be more productive. This post was just a quick review, without any screenshots/videos, so I highly recommend that you go to your local Verizon Store and actually try this out and decide if you like it or not. You can check out a full review of the Motorola Droid with pictures and video at Engadget.

As a part of their Droid Does campaign, Verizon recently sent MobileCrunch a surprise package. At first most of the MobileCrunch staff thought it would be an actual Droid, and it was but it wasn’t the Droid they were thinking it would be. They got an R2-D2 Droid, the one one from the Star Wars movie.

I’m pretty sure Verizon got a good laugh out of this and so did the MobileCrunch staff. The package that MobileCrunch got had the following:

• Remote controlled R2-D2 Droid.
• Batteries for the Droid and remote.
• Post card which revealed November 2009 as the release date for the Motorola Droid Smartphone.

You can watch the funny unboxing video that Greg Gumparak of MobileCrunch did here.

Verizon and Motorola launched their Droid Does campaign recently, and they are expected to announce details of the new Motorola Droid on October 28. Fortunately for us, Motorola did a mistake and accidentally put up information of the Droid early on their Droid by Motorola website. Now we have all the information about the Droid, except for the price and the release date.

The Droid is supposed to be an iPhone competitor, but all we’ve seen so far is nothing but advertisements and commercials and finally an actual picture of it. It will be the first Android phone to be running the Android 2.0 software.

Motorola has taken down the Droid by Motorola page, but thankfully I saved some screenshots of it. I will be posting specs, pictures, and more details in my next post. Stay tuned! I’m happy with the specs of this phone, but not sure about the look. Do you like how this phone looks? Feel free to share your opinions on it in the comments.

The Droid is not out yet, but the Droid does website and commercial have been up since Satuday. The commercial makes some fair points about the iPhone not having certain features, but what Verizon does not know is that most of the “i Don’t” remarks are not true for iPhone users who are jailbroken. If you don’t know what a jailbroken iPhone is, go to the jailbreak page to find out. If you want to jailbreak your iPhone, check out our jailbreak iPhone 3.1.2 post.

Here is a list of the features mentiond in Verizon’s  iDon’t commercial. Jailbroken iPhone users can already get these features.

• iDon’t have a real keyboard: An iPhone does not have  a physical keyboard, but it does have a virtual keyboard. Out of all the virtual keyboards I’ve tried, the iPhone’s virtual keyboard is the best. It is really easy to use, and I consider it a real keyboard.
• iDon’t run simultaneous apps: Users with jailbroken iPhones can download the Backgrounder app from Cydia and multi-task with it.
• iDon’t take night shots: Yes, Verizon is right on this one.
• iDon’t allow open development: I’m not really sure what Verizon means by this, but the jailbreak community does allow open developmet.
• iDon’t cusomize: Jailbroken iPhones are really customizeable. With Saurik’s Winterboard application, the iPhone can be themed. There are many different quality themes available in Cydia.
• iDon’t run widgets: Try the Intelliscreen application from the Rock application. It has widgets that allow you to put whatever you want on your lockscreen. There’s also an application called QTweetr that lets you tweet any time you want by sliding it out.
• iDon’t have interchangeable batteries: That’s true, no amount of jailbreaking can give us interchangeable batteries but I don’t really look for this feature in phones.

If Apple were open source, the iPhone could really take on all their competitors. Unless Apple opens up, their competitors like Verizon Droid, Palm Pre, or other phones do stand a good chance at beating them. It doesn’t seem likely that Applew will ever open up. They are always trying to patch the exploits that allow iPhone users to jailbreak. They love playing the cat and mouse game. Will the Verizon Droid cause Apple to open up? I really hope so!

Yesterday I checked the XML file on the Verizon Droid Does website and noticed that the XML file had a countdown timer to October 30,2009. I thought that this date was the Droid release date, but it looks like I was wrong.

I’ve looked at web ads of the Droid, and they all say “November“. No release date for the Droid has been announced, but we know that it will be released in early November. One of our commentors told us that he saw a Google Ad for the Droid which said November 6, but that no longer appears in the Google search results. If you come across any information feel free to share in the comments.

One important feature that Verizon forgot to include in their Droid Does commercial is that the Droid phone does support Flash while the iPhone doesn’t! Earlier this year, Adobe announced that they will be releasing a mobile version of their Flash Player for Android, Windows Mobile, and the Palm webOS. The iPhone OS was not included in this list.

The Droid will be running Android 2.0 operating system. Flashplayer is expected to be released for the Android OS and other mobile operating systems some time in early 2010. With multi-tasking, Flash, and the most popular carrier, the Droid does stand a pretty good chance at competing with the iPhone. Will it be an iPhone killer? We’ll find out soon enough! The launch date is expected to be some time in early November.

Today Motorola announced their new Motorola Cliq smartphone at the Mobilize conference. This smartphone is powered by Android, and uses Motorola’s own interface dubbed as Moto Blur.

The Motorola Cliq has a slide down keyboard, 3G/HSDPA and WiFi, 5.0 megapixel auto focus camera, full HTML browser, and more. The Moto Blur interface syncs all your pictures, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace messages and displays them all in one screen. Moto Blur also continuously updates and backs up your data.

With all the continuous update the Motorola Cliq does I would imagine that it has a short battery life and would be laggy, but it’s too early to judge this right now. The Motorola Cliq will be available in Fall 2009 on T-Mobile and it will be available in white and platinum. No pricing information has been released yet. Head on over to Motorola.com to see a full gallery and more information on the Motorola Cliq.