Verizon is having it’s Droid party on Wednesday, Oct 28th. This will most likely include the official announcement of the availability of the Motorola Droid, along with prices and official specs. We’ve already seen the leaked Droid page show up and quickly disappear from Motorola’s website. Engadget has a great set of photos with all the specs and information available via the temporary website and there is even a video of the website in action before it was pulled. The specs seem almost too good to be true. The Droid has a 3.7″ screen running a resolution of 480×854 with a pixel density of 267 PPI. That’s pretty dense and it will be nice to see this phone in person. The other tidbit that is interesting is it’s 550Mhz processor, which is a TI OMAP3430. This is not the norm for Android phones at this time with most running Qualcomm MSM72XXX variants at 528Mhz, an ARM11 based processor. According to BGR, the TI is much better, and according to TI’s own product page for the OMAP3430, “the OMAP3430 multimedia applications processor delivers up to 3x gain in performance over ARM11-based processors.”
I am a big believer that using a computer, or in this case a smart phone, requires two main things. Input and Output. The stuff that happens in between, while important, doesn’t matter if the input and output are horrible. Imagine having the most powerful computer sitting on your desk. Now imagine you don’t have a keyboard or mouse and you have no screen to view anything. That computer is now useless. So, when choosing a smart phone, it’s important that the input and output match the power of the phone. The Droid comes with a physical keyboard as well as a virtual keyboard. This should make most all users happy with their method of input, and I have only read one report of the keyboard so far, and it wasn’t flattering, but it said the keyboard was decent. The next part to consider is the screen. 3.7″ certainly is big, but at 267PPI is there too much going on? Will Android 2.0 be able to scale accordingly to make the required texts big enough while still providing a wide open space for images/videos etc? Let’s hope it does.
