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Category: Mobile

Published: Wednesday, 12 January 2011 06:41

Finally, we’ve got a level playing field for the iPhone and Droid to do battle. Verizon is set to unleash the iPhone 4 in early February and it couldn’t be better timing for Apple. The Droid platform is only getting hotter and how long are consumers going to put off that upgrade while those old flip phones and sliders feel even more out of date?

Motorola’s new Droid Bionic unleashed at CES has emerged as one of the front runners to take on the new iPhone 4 and both will be competing for customers on the Verizon network. This is going to be fun. Both offer a similar feature set and any kind of app you can imagine. So it’s going to boil down to ergonomics, call quality, corporate support and overall aspirations of the consumer. Are there still furry creatures set on getting “the iPhone 4 the 4geebees”, or are people starting to realize it’s become way bigger than just Apple’s offering. We think the latter mainly because of the hyper networked social network and the cloud. It’s more and more about speed and connectivity and less about touchy feely.

For the last several months we’ve been using both a Droid X and iPhone 3G all over the Bay Area. There are lots of dead spots with the iPhone on the AT&T network as everyone knows but it’s not just AT&T. We tested a hacked iPhone and still encountered some connectivity issues. The Droid X has yet to drop a call outside and only a couple of times in the bowels of some companies in Silicon Valley.

The iPhone generally “feels” better and provides a better overall experience from an app perspective even if it’s a little slower. The Droid X is flat out fast, does everything and just needs to be refined. One example is the accelerometer. The Droid X never seems to get this right and is a source of constant frustration. The iPhone usually gets the orientation correct even if it’s slower to make the correction.

Anyway, we’ll be using both the Droid Bionic and iPhone 4 and test all our known dead spots to see how both phones perform. The iPhone will be 3G initially but who cares. If it does all the great stuff the iPhone does and makes calls that actuall stay connected that won't matter. Verizon is rolling out 4G LTE with several phones but consumers just want to know it makes good calls, takes good pics, and plays nice with social networks. At a recent focus group we couldn't find one person that cared about calling and texting or video conferencing at the same time.

This looks to be an extraordinary year for the evolution of smart phone technology and Verizon, provided its network is up to the task, is likely to get a spike in new customers that have been sitting on the fence waiting for the iPhone 4. Stay tuned.

Visit Motorola for more information about the Droid Bionic.
Visit Apple for more information about the iPhone4.