Motorola/Google/Verizon Droid Phone Friday

Ken — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:40:42 +0000

The new "Droid" phone, built by Motorola with Google's Android software, will be available on the Verizon network this Friday. All the preliminary reports indicate that it's an impressive phone, with features and quality to rival the iPhone.

So of course, everyone's calling it an "iPhone killer". Of course, they said that about the Blackberry Storm and the Palm Pre, and the iPhone certainly isn't dead yet.

You know, I would love to see the iPhone get some real competition. I would love to see other companies get innovative and come up with something revolutionary. But unfortunately, it seems like the best anyone can do is to build a product that's almost as good as what Apple already developed two years ago. Sure, you can talk about Android's open development policies, or things like physical keyboards and removable batteries, but those aren't revolutionary. It's as if Motorola, Google, and Verizon started with the iPhone, wrote down every complaint anyone has ever had about it, and then blended everything together into the Droid phone. There just aren't any new ideas there. Apple's iPhone, when it came out, was truly new. There would be no Pre or Droid without the groundbreaking precedents established by the iPhone.

There are certainly inferior products and technologies that have achieved market dominance, by virtue of being first, being cheaper, or aided by a monopoly. But the iPhone competitors have none of those crutches. So listen up, makers of would-be iPhone "killers": this isn't one of those cases where you can just make something "good enough" and hope to succeed simply on anti-Apple sentiment. Make something better. Spend some brainpower and R&D money on making something truly new. I'm a long-time user and admirer of Apple products, but that doesn't mean I don't want Apple to face some competition. We all want to see innovation. And what we don't need is for another Microsoftian purveyor of copy-cat inferior technology to rise to market dominance.