The other day I was thinking about how Droid should promote apps on commercials that are available for download on the Android Market. That idea worked very well for Apple. It turns out that the Droid marketing team was thinking what I was thinking. Below are a couple of commercials that feature apps created for the Droid. The two apps being talked about here are Runstar and Layar. Runstar is a fitness routine application and Layar is an augmented reality application.
You may have heard about the iPhone application that lets you put any combination on a Rubik’s cube and it solves it within a certain number of steps. But that app has nothing on the Motorola DROID Lego robot that can solve a cube in under 25 seconds. The Mindstorms robot was programmed using the Droid and uses an Arm A8 processor clocked at 550MHz.
Motorola decided to take a more sophisticated approach for the Milestone mobile phone. The Milestone is the European version of the Droid. I think they even mentioned something about “Intelligence and versatility converge.” Did you miss out on the commercials of the American version of the phone? Check em’ out in the link below. Then come back to this page and compare it to the below video of the Milestone:
- Its not a princess, its a robot [link]
- Stealth commercial [link]
- Teaser before phone was released [link]
Verizon and Motorola’s $100 million marketing campaign is hitting Apple in another place where it hurts, the actual design of the phone. In the commercial below, Verizon and Motorola compare the iPhone to a pretentious beauty queen and a princess. “Its not a princess, its a robot” states the commercial when describing the Droid. This ad almost made me feel slightly embarrassed about my iPhone for a minute there when they compared it to a tiara-wearing, digitally clueless beauty pageant queen. But then I remembered how I make money from the App Store and then I felt better for owning an iPhone again.
In the opening weekend an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech Inc. estimated that about 100,000 Verizon Droid mobile phones were sold. This is an impressive number considering that there was not much time between the announcement and the launch date.
Now that a week of data has been collected, a mobile analytics firm called Flurry estimates that about 250,000 Droid mobile phones have been sold in the last week.
Flurry has access to every 2 out of 3 iPhone and Android handsets for collecting data. Based on the 250,000 unit sales estimation, the Droid can now be called “the fastest-selling Android phone to date.”
The iPhone 3G S sold about 1.6 million copies across 8 countries in the opening week. The Verizon Droid launched in one country.
Broadpoint AmTech Inc. analyst Mark McKechnie estimated that 100,000 Verizon Droid mobile phones were sold over the weekend. In terms of specifications the Verizon Droid was intended to challenge the iPhone. The iPhone remains as king when it comes to selling the most number of units on an opening weekend, but clearly the Droid has made an impact on mobile phone competition. At least more so than the Palm Pre when comparing opening weekend unit sales.
When the original iPhone first launched, it sold about 270,000 units on the opening weekend. However the original iPhone had a much higher cost. And then iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S had about 1 million units sold on their respective opening weekends, thus creating the benchmark that many other mobile companies are striving for. The Palm Pre sold about 50,000 units on their opening weekend which was a record sales day for Sprint. If the Verizon Droid did end up selling 100,000 units in the opening weekend, then that means that about 50% of the company’s inventory has been bought.
What does this mean for the telecommunications market in general? What this means is that the iPhone has a small rival which may just help Verizon retain some of their customers from switching to AT&T. The Android Market will see an increase in sales too. It will be a fraction of the sales that Apple makes on the iTunes App Store, but we will definitely start hearing some developer success stories about how much they made from the Android Market in the near future.
Google and Verizon has made a new commercial for the upcoming Verizon Droid mobile phone. The new commercial features a stealth bomber dropping what looks like a bomb in different areas of the world. The commercial looks like it could be a science fiction movie. The last Verizon Droid commercial made fun of the iPhone by saying “iDon’t” followed by a feature that the Apple iPhone does not have which the Droid does have. AT&T is suing Verizon for the “there’s a map for that” theme ads.
Boy Genius Report gave the hands-on treatment on the Motorola Droid. Based on the screenshots I’ve seen, it looks very similar to an iPhone and the sliding QWERTY keyboard reminds me of a Sidekick. Below are some of the specs:
- Android 2.0 operating system (as predicted)
- Almost as thin as an iPhone 3G S and very thin QWERTY sliding keyboard
- Capacitive display
- The phone is made out of metal and rubber. The keyboard has a soft-touch rubberized finish.
- Each phone will have a desktop charger that comes with it. The charger turns the phone into a Multimedia Station by displaying the local weather and time.
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