John Bresee

What I hadn’t realized when I got the Droid is that market economics don’t apply. You don’t have a customer in the Verizon store comparing the heft of the iPhone and the Droid and saying, “hey, nice, if worse comes to worse I could cudgel a would be attacker to death with this five pounds O’Droid.

What I mean is that people are so fooled by their wireless contracts or about the disinformation about network superiority or inferiority that they aren’t doing true comparison shopping. I picture Tina Turner, again from Mad Max saying to people at Verizon stores, “You know the story, Bust the Deal, Face the Wheel!”  And those people, white as ghosts from fear and from being relentless geeks with 80 plus hours a week of laptop tans, subsuming their will and instead of walking out the door and going and buying an easily superior product in the iPhone, instead saying, “what do you have that’s iPhone-ish?” I mean we all saw how Clark Griswold ended up with the coveted Family Truckster.

And that I get. After two years of pent up geek demand as they steadfastly didn’t give in to apple the Verizon faithful are going to line up long and deep and keep the factories Wii busy for ages to come. And we will have an actual two horse race for a little while.

And so my believe is that la familia, mi cosa nostra…etc. have a super hit on their hands. The mafia like entities Verizon and Motorola coming together to craft a blood oath under a waxingg moon with the naive Google is laughably funny. If you’re Google. See the old men from Schaumberg will do okay but somehow Verizon got tricked into being a dumb pipe again. Ouch.

If you read the best article on the wireless landscape in years, by Bill Gurley, he espouses a notion of Less Than Free and it’s powerful. When you look at the Droid you see Google taggers hammered the place. You can’t take a morning constitutional without the Droid scouring google for words like loamy or brown. Google is so deeply integrated into the Droid that they have uncorked the largeest champagne bottle of clicks, searches and paid clicks since Bill Gross first invented this little idea at a company known as GoTo.com.

Well played Google. Y’seee Verizon and Motorola…they can dance this dance again with anyone they like. There are lots of hardward vendors. And Verizon your right to dip your toe in the click stream was the play…but you didn’t make it. You made like the record companies not knowing that Apple was using you to sell iPods and create an ecosystem. And now Google has played the telcos in order to lift the cap off of their market cap. Double in 24-36 months. Nice work Sergey, Nice Larry.

Lets see how well you play the trust busters when the game next changes. B-Gates is still ahead of you there.

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Wow. When Goliath finally decides to step up and kill David you expect some fireworks. I mean Motorola isn’t exactly new at cell phones. They practically invented the Bat phone and those huge things that Crocket and Tubbs lugged around on ‘Vice. So when Google and Verizon and Motorola teamed up for the wireless Malachi Crunch I expected something really cool. Unfortunately the first go round with it suggests that it kinda sucks.

I remember my two year-old son was able to operate my iPhone and unlock it on his own. He was quickly navigating through the interface without any help. I was able to make the iPhone work without resorting to a manual. I was annoyed by the touch screen typing but I got used to it in a few weeks. Already I’m jonesing for my touch screen QWERTY. The Droid is confusing and awkward and lacks, well, UI. As the CTO at my company often says, “soft is hard”. And boy the User Interface just plain stumps someone with my room temperature IQ.

The hardware is okay. The flash on the camera is nice and the speaker is better. There’s a nice use of vibration/haptics in the interface that  I like. And it’s got a nice heft to it so when I finally get annoyed enough it’ll go clear through the window as opposed to bouncing off as the iPhone might.

I will say it’s better. The iPhone has forced the rest of the world to raise the level of their game. But all you Verizonites who can’t seem to understand that it’s only about $100 to break your contract will be happier on the Droid than on the DOS like Blackberry. But it’s no iPhone. The droid is the Corvette of phones…which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing.

The game isn’t over.

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