Motorola Droid hands on
boygeniusreport.com
boygeniusreport.com
I just feel bad for the established players.. They're going to have to watch as their core markets erode even further.
If it's a great piece of design, you don't need to stick labels all over it.
It's a fashion statement to have an iSomething. Even here on HN you never (or rarely) read I have booted up my Asus or Dell or whatever BUT there's always "my Macbook" or similar.
I like the underdog companies and I appreciate their effort and technology and I'm not buying into the iXXX hysteria. Apple was clever as it is being paid for being advertised. People pay sh%%loads for their products and they never ever forget to mention it in their discussions that they have one.
Geeks are a very small percentage of the market so unless the phone is not a "fashion accessory" there won't be massive commercial success with it...but it will be a great thing I hope.
It's like some people want a BMW just to impress the neighbors with a badge, while others can appreciate the level of engineering and the minds that went into the precision you can feel when you are driving it.
I like to make purchasing decisions based on the competency of the company in making what they make, but unfortunately most people don't think that way so a phone like this doesn't even get a chance.
I'd like to see a blind test for that. And who cares anyway if an expert can detect a certain "feel", other than for status?
This is the first thing I said to myself. I've never been a fan of the Verizon logo.
The other thing that came to mind in terms of the interface for some reason IBM's OS/2 Warp
1. Don't save on your casing
2. Girls don't like slide-out keyboards.
The killer android phone will look like the razr and be pretty expensive.
Suffice to say, that flexibility comes at non-trivial cost.
Second, from what I've seen of the SDKs, Google is doing quite a bit (most notably with their manifests) to maximize the reach of the platform (e.g. netbooks, automotive systems, set-top boxes) without unduly burdening cross-device portability.
Also I personally like the look. The edgyness may indeed not appeal much to girls - but I'd say it's definitely geek-compatible.
It's like me claiming that star shaped eyeglasses are not in fashion, because I don't see people wearing them, and you ask me to prove it. I can't prove it, but it just seems to me to be correct.
I suppose it's mostly fashion. Flip phones seem rare these days, for example.
Only now we are starting to see nice phones with nice software with slide-out keyboards.
An interesting point is implied - that men are more resistant (or less sensitive) to suckiness than women. That's something to debate.
Haven't tried the N82, but I had a series of E-series phones and all shared a tendency to crash, of being slow (starting many programs took several seconds, booting took up to two minutes - mind you: more than Windows does on a desktop PC) and having a generally confusing interface.
I had a Palm Centro briefly and despite its limited software, it was one of the best QWERTY phone I ever had. I look forward to the launch of WebOS phones here in Brazil.
I also assumed we were talking about QWERTY phones like this Motorola unit. I understand the Nokia S-60 series interface is less confusing on a simpler keyboard and the N8x series is among the best media phones you can buy.
I had a couple HP desktops in the late 80's that required blood to be shed in order for them to let a technician open their cases. Except for that, they were really fine computers.