Hasta La Gadget!

Boy Genius Report has thrown up a full preview of the Motorola Droid — or some prototype of it, anyhow — and any way you slice it, it looks like Android fans, Verizon fans, phone fans, and red-blooded Americans alike should all be feeling pretty good that this thing is gonna kick some ass. As if feeling and looking like a rock-solid, metallic beast wasn’t enough, Big Red’s first Android outing is said to have killer battery life — surprising, considering how mediocre the CLIQ’s is — and the seemingly flat keyboard apparently performs admirably, all things considered. Android 2.0 clips along at a nice pace thanks to an OMAP3 core, and obviously, there’s not much to complain about visually when you’re staring at a 3.7-inch capacitive display sporting roughly WVGA resolution. The icing on the cake, though, might be a magnetic sensor that detects an accessory dock that’ll be sold at launch, turning the Droid into a desktop clock and weather station — perfect for those rare moments when you’re not out and about scaring little kids with the phone’s robotic red eye. Needless to say, we’re looking forward to the 28th.

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola Droid gets fully previewed, ‘must-have’ claims may not be far off originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola tonight released the full specifications and a photo gallery of the highly-awaited Droid phone on their public Web site, pre-empting the anticipated October 28 announcement of Verizon Wireless’s first Android smartphone.

According to the Motorola site, which was first noticed by the Boy Genius Report blog but then independently confirmed and loaded by PCMag, the Droid is a large touchscreen phone with a sliding keyboard. It’s 2.4 x 4.6 x .5 inches in size and weighs six ounces. That’s relatively heavy, but slim. Its color will be “licorice w/brown sugar accents.”

The phone has an unusually high-resolution, 3.7″ 480×854 touch screen; the iPhone’s touch screen is only 320×480 resolution.

The Droid’s OS is Android 2.0, as Verizon previously showed on their teaser Web site for the device. It is the first Android 2.0 phone.

The Droid has a 550 Mhz processor, according to the site, which didn’t describe the processor architecture. The architecture is important because most Android phones up until now have run on 528 Mhz ARM11 processors, which some users consider sluggish in some circumstances. The recently announced Samsung Moment upped the ante to an 800 Mhz ARM11. If the Droid runs a newer form of architecture, known as Cortex-A8, it could be faster with a lower clock speed.

More details and photos after the jump.

Looks like we don’t need to bother deciphering coded countdown clocks any more. Last night Verizon Wireless sent out a bunch of invitations to a press event on October 28 for “2009’s most highly anticipated phone.” Engadget, InformationWeek and Gizmodo got invites, and we did too.

A box arrived for me from Verizon’s PR firm today, with a wonderfully scary little robot-eye sticker on the side. Given that the Motorola Droid launch is coming on October 28, could this be the new phone? Head to the jump to see what happened when I unboxed the contents.

Yawn. So, who else is bored of all of this Droid talk? Sure the phone isn’t out yet (or, really, even officially announced), but who isn’t ready to start planning for a second Motorola/Verizon Android handset? Apparently there’s one in the works already–actually, if the pictures leaked to Boy Genius Report are to be believed, the thing looks to be well on its way.

The phone–apparently codenamed: Calgary–seems to be the carrier’s answer to the T-Mobile Cliq. The device apparently runs Motorola’s Android Blur software, which would mean that it’s heavily focused on the social networking aspect of things, thus targeted largely toward the teenage Sidekick crowd, who, are likely not all that happy with T-Mobile/Danger at the moment.

The device has a QWERTY slider keyboard, Wi-Fi, and a 3MP camera.