The Droid You Are Looking For: Droid Knocks the iPhone from Time's Top Spot

Earlier this week, Time Magazine announced their yearly Top Ten lists, and at the head of the gadget pack was quite a surprise. The Motorola/Verizon Droid was crowned as Top Gadget of the Year—no small feat—while the iPhone languished in the 4th place position. Thankfully, the editors Lev Grossman and Peter Ha, give us a little light into their reasoning:

The Droid is a hefty beast, a metal behemoth without the gloss and finish of the iPhone, but you don't miss it. The Droid's touchscreen is phenomenally sharp and vivid, it has an actual physical (not great, but good enough) keyboard, and best of all, the Droid is on Verizon's best-of-breed 3G network. It's Android's first credible challenge to the iPhone.

How did the Droid de-throne the iPhone? Well, while much of the whole “iPhone killer” press is just clever media chatter, there’s something exciting about seeing a real competitor to the market that's important to recognize. Since 2007, when the iPhone was first made available to the public, cell phone and smartphone manufacturers have also been scrambling to come up with something to compete. It's never been a matter of getting the technology, necessarily; it's been a matter of getting the whole package right, and impressing its viability upon the public. Still, very few have risen to the challenge, and certainly none have attracted the loyalty Apple seemingly had on day one.

But for the last half of the decade, while people were tripping over themselves and pledging their first born children to get iPhones, Android has steadily gained in reputation and promise. The first release of an Android phone, the G1 by T-Mobile, was a bit lackluster. Chalk it up to T-Mobile service and, in general, the clunky design. And, as CNET observed, even the new, second-generation Android phone MyTouch still leaves much to be desired with a variety of gaps in its design including the lack of "standard 3.5 millimeter headset jack, a file manager, and camera-editing options".

So with T-Mobile still lagging behind, the buzz about a true "iPhone killer" (sometimes I feel like they're talking about Highlanders and not cell phones) has been feverishly pointing toward the new Motorola Droid, partnering with Verizon Wireless. And the editors at Time may be right, albeit a little premature in their ruling.

While their marketing strategy is certainly nowhere near as slick as the Apple approach, Droid has cleverly combined a powerful name in the cell phone game, Motorola, with a certain geeky trendiness that’s likely to appeal to a larger audience. Before the iPhone, nothing was more visible than the Motorola RAZR. Forget if the interface was horrible, it came in silver and pink and just looked like it might have fallen off of a spaceship. (I lusted after one until I finally caved and bought one, only to be so disappointed with the UI that I abandoned it for my old phone)

But now there’s no worry about bad interface since the sleek Droids use Android 2.0. And for the many customers frustrated with AT&T and T-Mobile, combining forces with Verizon wireless is a stroke of genius. It may just prove to be that alchemical mix needed to rattle the Apple from the tree. Or at least make the tree rock enough to get them worried.

It's no argument that the iPhone has forever changed the way that we think about and use our cell phones. But while it's dominated the market for the last few years, it's also done something else rather remarkable: it upped the ante. It’s exciting to see the innovation in other companies finally taking shape and to speculate about what the next decade may bring. Seeing how far Android has come in so few years is certainly refreshing. 

Comments

[slayer on December 14, 2009 at 05:57 AM]

Who trusts any of these magazines with their lists? Whoever leaves the largest bag of cash on the editor's desk gets to the top of the list. Plain and simple.

[CosmicConservative on December 14, 2009 at 06:16 AM]

The main reason the droid is competitive is that people like me, who NEED Verizon's network never had an opportunity to get iPhones, but the droid is available on our network. My droid is changing the way I interact with friends, co-workers and access the internet. I can't say if the droid is a threat to the iPhone, but I do know that the droid works for me and the iPhone was never an option.

[Will Collier on December 14, 2009 at 06:28 AM]

My in-laws both bought Droids recently. I have to say I was not particularly impressed. The screen does look great, but both the phones and the UI struck me as clunky. As many others have noted, the slide-out keyboard sounds nice, but in actual use it really sucks unless you have fingers the size of an infant's. My mother-in-law switched to the on-screen keyboard almost immediately. Both Motorola and Google have a lot of work left to do before Droid could be comparable to an iPhone in terms of basic usability. That doesn't let AT&T off the hook for being a dinosaur would-be monopoly with crappy service, of course...

[James Buff on December 14, 2009 at 07:08 AM]

I work in telecom in the carrier space, let me provide a little perspective that is msising in the article. Disclosure: I don't work for AT&T or Verizon, but I am an iPhone owner.

The Android/Droid/iPhone generation of phones are really the first set of phones to point out the technical limitations of AT&T and Verizon's networks. Please don't let the "marketing strategy" discussion dismiss a very valid technical differentiator raised in AT&T's latest ad campaign, that AT&T's network is the only one of the two that is capable of doing two things at once (talking on the phone and using the data connection at the same time). This is not a limitation of the phones, but of the network.

As a "power user", this is a big selling point to me. This feature isn't as essential as good coverage at home/work, but it's up there near the top.

For the short-term then, AT&T + iPhone is the better technical solution (due to network limitations) than Verizon + *anybody*. Does Verizon fix this when their network goes 4G? Yep! But that still doesn't fix the problem of some carriers letting their Android phones fall a version or two behind the latest from Google, just because they want to put their own look&feel stamp on it. The other carriers would do well to follow AT&T/Apple's model here, and let the phone maker control the OS directly.

The real paradigm shift is when the Google phone does everything via the data connection (VoIP, texting) and their Google Voice service for less than half the monthly cost of the other AT&T/Verizon smartphones. Can you imagine a fully-functional phone, for only the $30 monthly "unlimited data" cost of the iPhone? It won't be long now...

[MEC2 on December 14, 2009 at 09:17 AM]

As skirted around but not mentioned, the success of the Droid is due to the iPhone - namely, it's exclusivity on the ATT network. I cannot tell you how many people for the last two years would have loved to have bought an iPhone were it not for the fact they were on alternative carriers.

The exclusivity was good for exactly one party - ATT. If Apple had allowed the original agreement to simply lapse, and made their phones available on all the major networks, the Droid would have been smothered in it's crib. Instead, it was allowed to evolve and grow in an environment that iPhone could have easily dominated and crowded Droid out in. Instead, the Droid has grown, and is no longer a weak, struggling product, but increasingly mature and now IT is filling in for the unfulfilled demand the iPhone created but DID NOT SATISFY on alternative networks.

Apple. They will never get it.

[Peter on December 14, 2009 at 01:43 PM]

Time magazine's opinion?

Pass.....

[Chris on December 14, 2009 at 01:52 PM]

Ahhh......

....but just wait until the Federal Government mandates that everyone have one and the Gov't itself will oversee all the spiffy new teknowlijjy stuff that's supposed to go into subsequent versions.

Surely then we shall all have wunnerful, wunnerful phones that are all things to all people....

...and most likely of little value to anyone in particular.

Calling Dr. Reid, Dr. Pelosi, Dr. Obama.....Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine.....

Yup.

[psp screen protector on December 23, 2009 at 02:35 AM]

Android and droid will make iphone suffer...There are some real opportunities to over cross the market.

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