Official numbers are not being offered by Verizon or Motorola
Android is coming on strong as the OS
of choice for many device makers in the smartphone world. Many
consumers are also flocking to carriers that offer Android devices.
The Motorola Droid
launched officially on Verizon recently and the first weekend
sales estimates are in.
Bloomberg reports that Motorola
moved
about 100,000 Droid phones the first weekend it was available.
Verizon Wireless reportedly had about 200,000 Droids on hand and
stores sold about half their stock on opening weekend. Analysts
predict that Motorola will sell a million phones that run Android,
counting the Droid and others, in Q4 2009.
Predictions have
Motorola selling about 10 million Android phones in 2010. The Droid
is competing against the iPhone for market dominance and is hailed by
many as one of the fittest challengers to the Apple device yet.
Still, the launch of the Droid was nothing compared to the massive
launch of the iPhone.
Analyst Jim Suva from Citigroup said,
"It wasn’t as good as the iPhone, but anybody that was
expecting that had their expectations too high." Suva recommends
buying Motorola shares.
The Droid sells for $199.99 after a
$100 mail-in rebate making it more expensive than the 16GB iPhone 3GS
which can be had for $199 with no rebate required. However, the
iPhone is hamstrung by a notoriously shoddy AT&T 3G network that
results in significant amounts of dropped calls and patchy 3G
connectivity in even the largest cities.
Analyst Mark
McKechnie said, "I see the first few days as encouraging. There
seems to be pretty good demand -- they’ve taken the right steps and
picked a good partner with Google on the Android side."
Not
all analysts are convinced that the Droid or Android-powered devices
in general will resonate with shoppers. Tero Kuittinen told
Bloomberg, "I have this nagging suspicion that Android is
being overestimated by technology enthusiasts." He is advising
investors to sell Motorola shares.
"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007
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