Droid vs. iPhone: The reviews are in
Motorola and Verizon invited comparisons, and that's what they got
Photos: Motorola, Apple
The Droid lands in stores Friday, and on Thursday the heavyweight reviewers — which is to say the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and the New York Times' David Pogue — weighed in.
Given that Motorola (MOT) and Verizon (VZ) pitched the Droid in its first TV ad as everything Apple's (AAPL) and AT&T's (T) iPhone was not, it was perhaps inevitable that every reviewer so far, including these two, treated its arrival as a grudge match.
Mossberg's review is positive but tepid — especially the video version. He plods through the comparisons item by item like a slightly boring homework assignment. His top-line summary:
The man who put the 'i' in iMac
Meet the creative director who named a generation of Apple products
Photo: Apple
The TBWA\Chiat\Day creative team was horrified in 1998 when Steve Jobs pulled back a cloth and revealed the bulbous teardrop that came to be known as the Bondi-Blue iMac.
But then Jobs wasn't so crazy at first about the name they proposed for it.
No one had ever seen anything like the new computer, veteran creative director Ken Segall tells Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney in an exclusive interview published Tuesday evening.
"We were pretty shocked but we couldn’t be frank," Segall recalls. "We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, 'Jesus, do they know what they are doing?' It was so radical."
Segall eventually came up with "iMac," a name that connected the original 1984 Macintosh with the rapidly expanding Internet. But Jobs took some convincing.
Below the fold, excerpts from the story as Kahney tells it:
Five things we like about Droid
And a few things we don't love about Motorola's forthcoming Google-powered phone.
Droid does (and doesn't) wow our writer.
The Droid is a fierce phone. Motorola's newest smartphone has a number of features that match and even best its biggest competitor, Apple's (AAPL) iPhone. It has a fast processor. It’s got a large display with almost double the resolution of the iPhone as well as a slide-out keyboard. And it’s got a five megapixel camera with flash and zoom and a video camera that renders your Flip camera unnecessary. Add to that a new sharp-edged form factor straight out of Star Trek. And the marketers have given their campaign a bunch of attitude with their “iDon’t” commercial that pits the Droid directly against the iPhone.
But is any of that going to be enough to woo iPhone fans to Motorola's new device? As I wrote in a September feature, the company has a lot riding on it. Thanks to a massive marketing push by Verizon Wireless (VZ), plenty of excitement is building for the Droid’s November 6 launch. But just a year ago there was a lot of similar hype around RIM's Storm, which was also going to take on the iPhone. Though initial sales were pretty good, the smartphone received lukewarm reviews.
Motorola's new offering will have to prove itself once the hype dies down. And with so many Android-powered devices coming to market in the next few months, it may be hard for the Droid, which Verizon Wireless will sell for $199 after an $100 rebate with a two-year contract, to stand out.
Fortune received a Droid to test this morning. I powered it up, and a monotone robotic voice uttered “Droid.” Here are five things I think Motorola (MOT) has done right with the Droid…and a couple features I miss.
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The smartphone as navigator
New software transforms your phone into a GPS device – and a pretty good one, too
Navigon's MobileNavigator app for the iPhone has features some standalone units lack. Photo: Navigon.
As my wife will tell you, I have a comically bad sense of direction. I once got lost driving home from the mall.
This makes me a prime candidate for a GPS device. I’ve used a few for brief stints, mostly on long road trips, but never got into the habit of using one for everyday errands. There are a couple of reasons for that. For one, it’s a hassle to dig the thing out of the glove compartment. For another, entering an address on most of these things is a crazy-making experience.
My perspective changed recently, though, when I bought a new GPS unit for $70. Well, that’s not exactly what happened. I actually downloaded a GPS-based iPhone (AAPL) app for $70.
Yes, 70. Seven-zero. I’ll be the first to admit that it sounds crazy to pay that much for software that runs on a phone. The overwhelming majority of phone apps out there cost between 99 cents and $10. More
The Droid vs. the iPhone: Let's count the apps
Apple has 93,000 to Android's 11,300. But how many applications do you really need?
Photos: Motorola, Apple
In the flurry of quickie reviews that appeared overnight after Wednesday's unveiling of Motorola's (MOT) Droid — Google (GOOG) and Verizon's (VZ) latest answer to Apple's (AAPL) iPhone — little has been said about how the two platforms stack up in terms of apps.
At first glance, it seems an unfair comparison. Apple has spent a small fortune promoting those famous 85,000 iPhone applications — a number than has since grown to roughly 93,000 and is on track to hit 100,000 in a matter of weeks.
Source: AndroidLib.com
But it's not as if there are no apps for the Droid. As of Thursday morning there were 11,284, according AndroidLib.com's unofficial count of the offerings in Google's Android Market. Moreover, that number too is growing by the thousands. Android developers added 2,333 new apps in September and another 2,431 so far in October.
HTC: Your next fave smartphone?
The largest smartphone maker you've never heard of wants to capture the hearts – and dollars – of the U.S. consumer.
Motorola's (MOT) Droid phone is getting a ton of buzz, and that’s by design. Verizon Wireless (VZ) chief Marketing Officer John Stratton has said the marketing 
campaign behind its iPhone competitor will be the largest in its history.
But the Google (GOOG)-powered device isn't the only smartphone the company is likely to begin selling at the start of November. Though no one has officially confirmed, the carrier is expected to announce a second device that will also run on Google's Android operating system at half the price: the HTC Droid Eris.
Haven’t heard of HTC? You aren't alone. More
AT&T Mobility is nipping at Verizon's heels
Verizon Wireless' subscriber rolls are growing, but not as fast as AT&T's
Source: Company reports
In the quarterly report that Verizon (VZ) issued Monday, the number that's getting the most attention is 1.2 million.
That's how many new wireless subscribers Verizon added over the past three months. And it's being compared unfavorably with the 2 million that AT&T Mobility (T) gained in the same period.
Verizon, with a new total of 88.8 million subscribers, still has the largest wireless network — something its ads never tire of reminding us. But AT&T, with 81.6 million, is catching up, and there's no mystery why. AT&T activated a record 3.2 million iPhones in the third quarter, nearly 40% of which belonged to customers new to AT&T.
Meanwhile, Verizon's total churn rate is going up (from 1.33% last year to 1.49% this year) while AT&T's is going down (from 1.69% to 1.43%).
But AT&T's momentum may be short lived. More
The Droid: Serious iPhone competition
Motorola's Droid. Source: BGR
Just in time to rain on Apple's (AAPL) 2009 earnings report, a prime-time TV ad and a series of well-timed leaks have put the spotlight on Motorola's (MOT) Droid — a yet-unreleased smartphone that is being described by sources who have played with a prototype as the iPhone's first serious competitor.
The ad, which premiered Saturday during the Yankees-Angels pennant game, is pasted below the fold. The challenge to Apple couldn't be less subtle; it's a series of "iDon't" screens listing key features the iPhone doesn't have — from a physical keyboard to interchangeable batteries — that the Droid does.
The leaks are being funneled primarily through the Boy Genius Report, a blog with unusually good sources in the telecommunications industry. On Friday the site published an illustrated walk-through of Google's (GOOG) Android 2.0 — the new and reportedly much improved version of the open-source operating system that powers the Droid. Then, overnight Monday, Boy Genius posted a hands-on review — complete with photo gallery — that describes it as "the Android device to beat, and easily the most impressive."
Will Wal-Mart's Straight Talk squeeze wireless carriers?
Back to the future: Straight Talk phones like the LG 200C might be dowdy, but growth in the prepaid market could eventually squeeze carrier profits. Photo: LG.
Look out, U.S. wireless carriers: Wal-Mart is teaming up with billionaire Carlos Slim’s América Móvil to train its price-crushing might on cell phones.
In time for the holiday season, the mega-retailer on Wednesday announced a nationwide roll-out of the new prepaid Straight Talk service, offered through América Móvil subsidiary Tracfone Wireless. Unlike mainstream wireless plans that pair cutting-edge phones with higher monthly fees and multi-year contracts, pre-paid services like Straight Talk offer cheaper phones, lower fees and no contracts.
Wal-Mart will offer two Straight Talk options: a $30 monthly plan that comes with 1,000 minutes, 1,000 texts and 30 megabytes of data, and a $45 monthly plan with unlimited voice, texts and data. Straight Talk uses Verizon’s (VZ) wireless network. More
Can Sanjay Jha save Motorola?
A new tech wizard is fighting to return the ailing cellphone maker to relevance with a slate of new phones–and help from Google.
It’s been more than a year Sanjay Jha left wireless chip maker Qualcomm (QCOM) to come to Motorola (MOT). As co-CEO of Motorola (along with Greg Brown), he took on a task even the private equity firms had passed on: saving the iconic handset division. Just as he began to realize the severity of the company’s situation, the market crashed—and everything got even harder. Jha stripped $1.4 billion from the budget and doubled down on a new strategy to hitch the company's wagon to Google (GOOG), building a series of smartphones powered by the Android operating system. (For more on the top operating systems, check out System Overload.)
This fall, as the first of the smartphones hit the market, Jha sat down with Fortune to reflect on his first year on the job, his plan for saving the company, and the enormity of the challenges yet to come. Read the whole story on here.
