Verizon Takes a Direct shot at iPhone with Motorola Droid

If you’ve watched any television lately, it’s been hard to miss the ads from Verizon Wireless promoting their latest foray into the mobile device market. Interestingly enough, it isn’t enough for Verizon to just advertise their new device, dubbed “Droid”, but they need to slam the iPhone at the same time. The ads directly attack the iPhone by pointing out what it might be missing with an “everything iDon’t, Droid does” campaign.

What many want to know is if the Droid will be a true iPhone competitor, and it’s hard to tell; the company is keeping most of the real details under wraps for the moment. However, with some leaked information and a little analysis of the Droid commercial, we’ve been able to come up with a list of specs that might just put it in contention.

Unless Verizon is pointing out what they “don’t do either”, then some of the most important features are given as hints in the ads that have been running. With the Droid, we can be confident that the batteries are swappable, although I must point out that a lot of cell-phone users never change their battery. According to the hints, we can also expect the Droid to multitask. Unfortunately for Apple, the iPhone hardware is fully capable of application-switching, but they have as of yet chosen not to take advantage of it.

Although I don’t really expect the Droid to knock the iPhone off its pedestal, I do think that the stats we have show that it could make a good run at it. For the processor, the Droid sports the TI OMAP 3430, a top of the line mobile processor that is neck in neck with the iPhone hardware.

One regularly resounding complaint of iPhone users has been the lack of a real keyboard. The Droid has a physical QWERTY keyboard with broader keys than devices like the BlackBerry Tour, making it easier to type on. For the screen display, the Droid is trying to take the cake with a 854×480 over the 640×480 screen on the iPhone.

Another big plus the Driod is going to have over the iPhone is the carrier quality. Unless Verizon has a massive network meltdown between now and the release of the Droid, it has the potential to be a game-changer just because it is on the preferred network.

All in all, the Droid is hinting at some real potential for competition, at least on paper. The truth about it remains to be seen. Make sure to keep an eye out for more iPhone, BlackBerry, SharePoint and hosted Exchange information, news and general techie stuff!