Hasta La Gadget!

Call it a pent-up demand for WVGA Android devices, call it Droid jealousy, call it an unnatural love for the sweet, doughy goodness of a just-baked Eclair — but whatever it is, early indications suggest that the British love their Milestones. Retailer eXpansys (which is big enough to actually produce some meaningful sales trend data, we suspect) is reporting that the just-launched Droid clone for GSM became “the fastest selling gadget in the website’s 11 year history, even more successful than the iPhone” when it sold out inside of three hours on its site on top of the roughly 1,000 preorders they had taken prior to the 10th. This might be a case of double-speak — we’re trying to establish just how many phones were sold during those three hours, because what we really need is a sales rate, not a time span alone — so we’re cautioning Moto not to bust out the champagne glasses just yet, but it’s certainly looking like a promising start. Schaumburg hasn’t had a lot of success in Western Europe in recent years, of course, but if we can use eXpansys as a barometer here, we’d say that a little cautious optimism is well justified.

Motorola Milestone becomes eXpansys UK’s ‘fastest selling gadget’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The “coming weeks” timeframe that Verizon had promised for 2.0.1 to start pushing to Droids has been mercifully condensed down to just a few days, because a number of folks are starting to report that they’re receiving the update on their retail units today — and we’ve been able to confirm with the company that it’s going down. That’s great news for a Monday, we’d say, and if you haven’t gotten the update just yet, Big Red has now posted update instructions and details on the Droid’s support site that should be enough to tide you over for a few minutes. In brief, this looks like bug-fix nirvana with improved stability and battery life, better camera and call quality, faster visual voicemail, and a host of other goodies — anyone hoping for new features is probably primed for disappointment, but we’ll take what we can get. Keep an eye on your Droid today, owners, and let us know how the experience treats you.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Motorola Droid getting 2.0.1 now, Verizon posts details originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Knowing what we now know of the Droid — codename Sholes — the mere mental image of that “Sholes Tablet” that we’ve been hearing about for a while brings us to our geeky knees. Taiwanese forum Mobile01 seems to have details on just what the Sholes Tablet is all about, and while we’d normally be skeptical to the point of dismissal, the presence of a few believable-looking images has us on the bandwagon. The biggies on the rumored spec sheet include HDMI out, 720p video recording paired to an 8 megapixel cam (which is hopefully of much, much higher quality than the Droid’s miserable 5) with xenon flash, and Motorola’s own CrystalTalk tech for background noise reduction on calls. It’ll apparently be running Android 2.0 — the presence of BLUR is unknown — and the screen is a predictably awesome 3.7 inches at WVGA resolution with multitouch support; missing, as the name suggests, is the original’s sliding QWERTY keyboard. All signs point to use seeing this in the next few months, so enjoy those Droids and Milestones while you can, yeah?

Motorola Sholes Tablet detailed, sounds as tasty as we’d hoped originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember back in the day when the West was still wild, the gold rush was still in full effect, you owned whatever land you could manage to fence off, and tycoons were being made and broken on a daily basis? No? Well, some of you whippersnappers might be too young to recall it, but trust us, it happened — and it seems like that’s the kind of frontier mentality we’re getting again today in the nascent Android landscape. Just a couple weeks after launching, mobile ad clearinghouse AdMob reports that the Motorola Droid is already accounting for a whopping 24 percent of all its Android-based traffic — no small feat, considering that the then-unreleased device didn’t even move the needle in their October report (pictured in the left graph). The HTC Dream — the world’s first retail Android device, you might remember — still reigns supreme at 36 percent, but it’s amazing that the entire Android space is still volatile enough to register nearly a 25 percent shift with the launch of a single new device on a single carrier. For comparison, the CLIQ clocks in with a lowly 6 percent — proof that Verizon’s aggressive advertising has been working some magic. Question is, what’ll be the next device to completely screw up this pie chart again?

Stats show Motorola Droid is the new elephant in the Android room originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Purported Motorola Droid prototype turns up on eBay originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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