Motorola will be launching its long anticipated Droid in November, and it’s going to turn the smartphone market, let alone cellphone market, on its head.  Over the past 2 years, Apple’s iPhone has dominated the smartphone market as the standard to beat, and with the help of Verizon, Google, and the Open Source software community, the Droid may stand to be the next gold standard in this extremely popular and growing market.

The Droid has been designed totally around the Open Source – ‘Android’ platform which has had significant support by Google.  Everything the iPhone can do, the droid seems to be able to match, and then go a few giant steps beyond.  For instance, iPhone has had a large touch sensitive screen contained within a sleekly  designed case.  Droid gives has this same sleek, sacrificing only a slight increase in its width but for the sake of accommodating a full QWERTY keyboard for addition screen affording you a ton of real-estate that would otherwise be taken up by on onscreen keyboard.

You might think of Open Source software as the “grass roots” standard in the industry.  But consider this: this past week, the White House announced that the country’s “Recovery.Gov” is built with Drupal, an extremely popular, Open Source, Content Management System (CMS) used for creating and managing web sites.  If one of the Internet’s most popular and busy websites, can prove the strength and integrity of Open Source software, then all markets that Open Source technology touches will become seriously interested in this popular alternative to expensive proprietary software.

When Apple launched the iPhone on the AT&T network over 2 years ago, many Verizon Wireless subscribers were disappointed that they wouldn’t get the sleekest hardware from the coolest of cool companies.  But since Verizon’s subscriber base has grown steadily over the same period, the lack of a partnership with Apple doesn’t seem as if it has hurt the network much.  AT&T on the other hand, hasn’t experienced the same kind of growth as Verizon Wireless has, despite the extreme popularity of the iPhone.  It would seem more often than not that subscribers are choosing their service providers first and their hardware manufacturer second.

The mobile handset market in the US is largely disposable, and might not even qualify as a totally retail product.  Consumer’s typically purchase their hardware at prices that are subsidized by carrier plan prices, and the selection of products that is available to them must lay within the scope of the handsets that are available to the carrier’s particular network.  Every 1 - 2 years carriers often offer handset replacement options when their subscribers sign up for new contracts.  This makes the attachment to a particular device fairly transient, and forms a kind of “leased” form of buying when a handset is acquired by a consumer.

 

When the Droid hits the Verizon Network next month, it will have the support of thousands of Mobile Apps thanks to Google.  Both this year and last, Google has held the “Android Developer Challenge”, a contest which awarded ten top prizes of $275,000 and several more $100,000 prizes to boot.  Thousands of developers were intrigued by the challenge, seeding the market with thousands of apps including my favorite, Beer Cloud, an app that allows you to use the droid for scanning the barcode from any bottle of bear and finding out everything about it, including where you can buy another six-pack or which bar happens to be serving it, thanks to the built in GPS system that is included inside the device.

 

 

Motorola Droid Specs
* Operating System:	Android 2.0 (Eclair
* Network:	CDMA
* QWERTY Slider Keyboard
* 5 Megapixels camera with 4x digital zoom
* Music and video
* Battery life:	of up to 6 hours and 41 minutes
* Bluetooth:	Stereo Bluetooth technology v2.1 + EDR
* WiFi:	802.11 b/g
* Web Browser:	Webkit HTML5, Flash 10 support
* 3.5 MM Headset jack
* App Store:	Android Market
* Interface:	Backlight, light-responsive display, and virtual keyboard
* Display size:	3.7″; WVGA (480 x 854 pixels); 16:9 widescreen * Weight: 6 oz
* Size (H X W X D):	2.4 x 4.6 x 5 in
* Antenna Type:	Internal
* Processor Speed:	500 mHz
* Removable Memory:	16 GB microSD pre-installed; supports up to 32 GB microSD expndable
* Sensors:	Proximity and ambient light Motorola
Droid Release date	November 6th, 2009

Mobile handsets driven by Open Source technology will become the standard in the SmartPhone market, simply because they are so easy to develop on, and support a world-wide community of programming enthusiasts.  I doubt that Motorola will be able to hold on to a majority of the Open Source handset market, but count on them cashing in greatly in the short term…people have been waiting for the iPhone killer for a while now, and it looks like its arrived on the scene.