Doing it Right this time with the Motorola Droid

The Motorola name hasn’t seen much market interest these days since its first radically amazing RAZR clamshells back in the 90s.  While subsequent ROKR did make the popular rounds, there was only a downhill route all the way for the RAZR line that bored it intended markets and carried the Motorola name with it. Enter the Motorola DROID and things are starting to look up for the Motorola fortunes.

With Google and Verizon throwing their weight behind it, the Droid is expected to make the Android smartphone a real force in the mobile phone markets that have Symbian and Windows competing for attention not just among users but makers as well.  The Android is a young OS and has already made its mark among tech savvy smartphone users.  The Motorola Droid is the world’s first full QWERTY touchscreen to use the latest Android 2.0 release.

Motorola Does the Job Right This Time.

Smarting from its RAZR failures with boring designs that only aped the shadows of its pioneering RAZR model when it was first introduced, Motorola is pitching the Droid on both sides of the Atlantic as its ticket to getting back its market leadership position among mobile phone users.  Scheduled to be released in Europe under the Milestone name and 02 networks, the Droid is expected to fetch a reasonably good price of ₤481 SIM-free but could easily go down that point once it is released. This makes its price-feature ratio quite appealing even to the most jaded Motorola hater out there.

With a 3.7” capacitive touchscreen with wide VGA resolution and a 5 megapixel camera with LED autofocus, geo tagging and DVD-quality video recording as well as powerful processor that sports Open GL for graphics intensive games, the Motorola Droid is essentially a top of the line smartphone.  A 256 internal memory is modest but its microSD support should give you 16Gb of external memory expandability. You get 3G/UMTS with broadband HSPA data connectivity, WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and A2DP as well as GPS in two flavours – Google Maps for the US Droid version and Motorola’s MOTONAV system for the European Milestone version.

With its upscale features and a good price at a SIM-free €481 as announced by O2 in Germany, it’s interesting how the DROID/Milestone will work out on both sides of the Atlantic to reverse Motorola’s sagging fortunes.