Hasta La Gadget!

Can’t wait to get those mitts on a Droid Bionic, but still wondering what lies beneath? Seems as though the Motorola mobile of mystery can’t hold its secrets forever, since the specs of the Bionic are now up for perusal on Motorola’s developer site. Here’s the skinny: it’s got a TI OMAP 4430 1GHz dual-core CPU bundled with 1GB RAM (twice the amount in the Droid 3), a 4.3-inch qHD display with 960 x 540 resolution, HDMI 1.4, 8 megapixel rear camera accompanied by a VGA front-facing shooter and 1080p HD video capture, webtop capabilities, and the obvious LTE radio. Unfortunately, the specs confirm the Bionic’s lack of GSM / EDGE — essentially turning it into a fancy PMP when traveling abroad — and doesn’t bother mentioning battery size (or life, for that matter), the most confounding question still lingering aside from the release date. C’mon, Motorola, can we at least get a hint?

Update: A keen-eyed tipster alerted us to one minor snafu in the above image: it shows the Motorola XT865 — the original Droid Bionic unveiled at CES 2011 last January — instead of the XT875, which belongs to the new and redesigned model. We can’t be sure if this is an typo on the site or if it really is the old version. Either way, we’ll keep a close eye on the story and update if we hear anything else.

Motorola Droid Bionic specs revealed: TI OMAP 4430 dual-core CPU, Android 2.3.4 on board (update: wrong model number) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Aug 2011 19:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When we first laid eyes and hands on Motorola’s first Android offering for Virgin Mobile, we were pleasantly surprised. The Triumph proved to be one of the better looking and performing pre-paid handsets we’d had the pleasure of holding in our sweaty mitts, but we had one major hangup: the name. Call us old fashioned, but we’re of the mind that it’s unsportsmanlike to claim victory before the race has even begun. After all, we aren’t looking at an iPhone killer here. To the contrary, the Triumph is a decently outfitted, Motoblur-free Froyo phone, with a suitable 4.1-inch WVGA screen, a workable 2GB of storage, and a fairly attractive (and contract-free) $300 price tag. So, after a week in our palms and pockets, did the Triumph really affirm its arrogant appellative or did it fail to live up to its name? The answers to this and other, less alliterative, questions await you after the break.

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Motorola Triumph review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A recent update to the Droid X has owners up in arms.Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com

A software update is supposed to deliver the latest and greatest features to your device. It’s not supposed to cripple your device. And yet that’s exactly what happened to a number of customers who received the most recent update to their Droid X phones.

In early June, Verizon began rolling out Android operating system version 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) to the Droid X, which previously ran Android 2.2 (Froyo). Shortly thereafter, the grievances started rolling in on Motorola’s online customer message board.

Complaints about the update spanned the entire gamut. Customers experienced random reboots, delayed start up times, weakened 3G connectivity, reduced keyboard functionality; the list goes on and on. In two of the update’s most egregious offenses, a number of users seems to have lost the ability to store contact information locally on the phone itself.

“In my view, it takes away more than it gives, and it attempts to impose a server-based model for contacts management that has proven to be a disaster for me, my family and my business,” one frustrated Droid X owner wrote.

Google has continually faced problems keeping all the different Android-powered handsets up to date on the latest version of its software. For some phones, it’s simply an issue of the hardware being too old to run the newest Android release. For others, the reasoning isn’t as clear. It is worth noting, however, that manufacturers have less incentive to devote company resources to update older devices rather than spend time on newer ones. It’s unfortunate to see a software update do more harm than good, especially when a company provides a software update to a phone that was released over a year ago.

In one lengthy, exhaustive post, a user on the official Motorola message board web site has documented all the reported problems associated with the update: 80 different problems to date.

Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Motorola issued a statement to Wired.com Friday morning: “We’ve noted the forum feedback, and we are working closely with Verizon on an update for these users.”

An official Motorola forums moderator stated multiple times over the past two months that the company is looking into a software fix, but no official timeline has been released.

The kicker to all of this? You can’t easily roll back to the previous version of Android without using third-party software. That means voiding your phone’s warranty, which isn’t exactly a popular option.

So unfortunately for frustrated Droid X owners, they’ll have to play the waiting game with Verizon and Motorola until a fix is released — or shell out the cash for a new phone. Was that the plan all along?

The Motorola Xoom is not faring as well as its iOS counterpart. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Motorola announced dismal device sales in its earnings report on Thursday, with tablets faring near the worst among the company’s products.

The company shipped 11 million mobile devices over the past three months, according to the quarterly statement. Yet only 440,000 of those were tablet devices. In other words, the Motorola Xoom Android tablet flopped big time.

Out of the remaining 10.56 million devices shipped, 4.4 million of those were smartphones. That number of course pales in comparison to Apple’s 20-plus million iPhones sold last quarter, and even to the 5 million Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphones sold in the first three months of the phone’s release. Especially considering that’s 4.4 million across all of Motorola’s device models.

It’s a quarter of rough numbers for the company, which of course is facing competition on all sides. For perspective’s sake, compare the 440,000 Xoom tablets with Apple’s numbers this quarter: The Cupertino giant sold 9.25 million iPads over the last quarter, almost 20 times the number of Motorola’s Xooms. And it’s important to note that when Motorola says 440,000 units “shipped,” that signifies the number of devices sold to retail stores, not to customers. It’s difficult to determine how many actual sales to customers occurred without further detail.

And even if the iPad weren’t doing so well, the Xoom is still competing with the myriad Android tablets available from other hardware manufacturers.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom for the U.S.-based mobile device manufacturer. Smartphone sales are up from 2.7 million during the same time period last year, which is nothing to scoff at.

But with the majority of phone sales being “dumbphones” — or relatively low-end cellular devices — the company’s strategy of relying heavily on smartphone sales as a strength has yet to pan out.

With any luck, the company will be able to turn things around as more smartphone devices debut in the fall. Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha announced that the Droid Bionic — a highly anticipated dual-core smartphone which was pushed back to the drawing board for further improvements — will debut some time in September.

Nielsen data shows Android still reigns supreme in the land of operating systems, though Apple is owning the hardware manufacturing territory. Photo courtesy of Nielsen

As Android spreads across multiple devices, Google’s operating system continues to dominate on smartphones. A report released Thursday backs that up, showing that Android remains the top smartphone operating system in the United States.

But these numbers miss a key point: Android may be the leading platform on smartphones, but what about all the other iOS-powered devices out there that aren’t iPhones — the iPod Touch and the iPad?

Today’s research report, which was published by Nielsen, claims a 39-percent Android platform market share across the major smartphone manufacturers, while Apple’s iPhone operating system claims a 28 percent stake. The results show data from smartphone purchases occurring during the second quarter of 2011 in the U.S.

But therein lies the huge blind spot in Nielsen’s data measurement: Apple sold over 20 million iPhones over the last quarter, but add iPads and iPod Touch devices to that, and the number bumps up to nearly 37 million iOS devices. In three months.

Technology research firms such as Nielsen regularly publish market share analysis to measure which companies are leading the industry. In mobile, Google and Apple are consistently neck-to-neck in market share reports, but it’s questionable why research firms continue to leave tablets and all-in-one portables like the iPod Touch out of the mobile picture.

Which, considering recent reports, may be a big mistake. For instance, GoGo — an in-flight Wi-Fi service provider that works with Virgin America airlines — told AllThingsDigital that while iPhones make up two thirds of wireless devices connected to its in-flight services, iPod Touch devices account for another 20 percent. That’s even higher than the number of Android devices used to access the network (only 12 percent).

Another tidbit to consider: Despite Android’s platform dominance in the smartphone space, over 80 percent of Wired.com’s mobile traffic comes from iOS-based devices. That includes the iPad, iPod Touch and the iPhone. The iPad and iPod Touch aren’t smartphones, but they run the same operating system as the iPhone.

It highlights a specific problem in surveys like Nielsen’s: Measurement criterion. If we’re measuring a platform’s total market share, homing in on “smartphones” specifically rather than mobile devices gives a skewed representation of total platform penetration. It would be a fairer analysis to count all the tablets,smartphones, and all-in-one portables (i.e., the iPod Touch) powered by Android and iOS and comparing those side by side.

Jim Dalrymple of The Loop gives an apt analogy on the matter in an April blog post:

That would be like comparing one model of Mercedes against all cars that GM makes and saying the Mercedes is losing. It just doesn’t make any sense. You can’t have it both ways. You either have to compare hardware devices or operating systems, you can’t mix and match.

A Nielsen spokesman acquiesced when we made the point mentioned above, but countered with an emphasis on how smartphones are one of the more important metrics to watch.

“Smartphones are really driving a lot of the innovation around the different platforms right now,” Nielsen spokesman Don Kellogg said in an interview. “When you look at the smartphone manufacturer share, it’s still very small compared to Apple or even RIM.”

That point highlights the other very important part of the survey. While Android may or may not reign in the smartphone realm, Apple leads the pack as the top smartphone manufacturer with its 28-percent share. RIM, which also owns both its software and hardware, is second in command with 20 percent. HTC also accounts for 20 percent of the hardware market, when taking into account both its Android phone and its Microsoft OS-powered devices.

Which are numbers that may ultimately matter more than platform penetration.

“These things matter from the perspective of securing the deepest level of customer loyalty,” Forrester analyst Charles Golvin told Wired.com. “Because of their vertical integration Apple gets both loyalty components and cements a deeper customer relationship as a result.”