Kiss the iPhone Goodbye: Verizon Launches Droid Attack

Verizon isn’t pulling any punches: it calls out basically every major weakness on the iPhone, from its inability to run background applications to the App Store’s walled garden. The site kicks off with a stream of things that the iPhone can’t do, mimicking the black text-on-white background commonly seen in Apple ads but replacing it with statements like iDon’t run simultaneous apps. After a handful of these, the site kicks you to a page with the heading “DroidDoes”, with a banner rotating through a number of the Droid’s features that include Android 2.0, background tasks, and video recording support. Some of the differences mentioned, like the Droid’s inclusion of a physical keyboard, are really a matter of personal preference. Others, aren’t. For one, Droid can claim to run on “The Network”, which runs circles around AT&T.

Michael Arrington says Droid is the real deal:

The phone is a three-way effort between Motorola, Verizon and Google. It looks a lot like the iPhone, and may even be as thin or thinner than the iPhone 3GS… Unlike previous Android phones, the Droid is rumored to be powered by the TI OMAP3430, the same core that the iPhone and Palm Pre use, and which significantly outperforms Qualcomm 528MHz ARM11 based Android phones that exist today (Engadget has a great overview article on mobile CPUs). Droid will also be running v.2.0 of Android, with a significantly upgraded user interface.

Irked that it took too long for a fix to a bug that arbitrarily put my iPhone in “coma mode” and by an experience I had yesterday at the local AT&T store, I’m ready to kiss my iPhone goodbye. If Droid’s half as good as the hype I’ll gladly pay early termination penalties to abandon it and move me (and my family) to the Droid.

RELATED: Read Fred’s full post on this big week in the mobile web. Says Fred, “The mobile web sector is developing quickly and innovation is happening all over the place. It is very exciting to see.” His #3 highlight of the week is a standard for broadcasting video (and audio) to mobile devices:

The AT&T network has suffered as iPhone users have adopted rich media on their devices. The same could happen to Verizon if the Droid is as popular as I think it can be. But there are ways to offload much of the high bandwidth services. Instead of watching the Yankees game via the AT&T or Verizon network, you can watch it over the digital TV broadcast spectrum using the ATSC standard that will ultimately find its way onto mobile devices.

SEE ALSO: The Big Money lists Droid as just one of the clouds ahead for Microsoft.