Droid vs. Nexus: Will the Older brother fall to the wayside?
By Christopher Woolum
When I received my shiny new Droid in its brown FedEx box, I was one of the happiest tech geeks in the world. Coming off of a yearlong stint with the Omnia had weakened my love of Samsung and its last three phones that I owned (i-730, i-760, Omnia). Turning on the phone, I was not in the least bit disappointed by the new Verizon flagship phone. Its shiny crisp screen dwarfed the Omina's and the amazing offering of apps was well worth the upgrade. The real question for everyone who has a droid now though is, “What happens when Nexus One comes out? Will Verizon all but kill support for the droid like it has for so many flagship predecessors?”
In physical comparison, the biggest difference between the droid and the Nexus one is the lack of physical keyboard. For some people this may be a deal breaker. I know that after using a phone with only an on-screen keyboard, I really missed having a physical keyboard to type on. This was an excellent feature of the droid. It makes it slightly thicker but it has not bothered me at all. When looking at hardware, the Nexus One features the snapdragon processor clocked at 1 GHz. The droid shares a processor with the IPhone clocked at 550 MHz. Both Phones come with 512 Mb of internal storage where all apps and the OS are stored.izon has always been bad about providing updates for their smartphones. An excellent example is the Blackberry Storm. This was a hot phone that was a flagship product that had some major problems from the start and it took over 6 months to release an update. I purchased the Omnia because I had more of a use for a smartphone than a fancy regular phone. Poor performance coupled with an awful UI and the lack of GPS access led to a really disappointing experience. Similar to the Storm, the Omnia update took well over 6 months and finally gave the user access to the GPS but did not really fix many of the performance issues that troubled it.
Google Release the G1 in the United States on October 22, 2008 with OS 1.0. By January 31, 2009, the phone already had its first major operating system update. From Google we already see more commitment to the mobile sector. Verizon released the first update for the droid in less than 2 months of its release.
I believe in the future, Google will continue to release these updates and operating system releases (hardware supporting of course) to the users of legacy equipment. The g1 was updated as far aI believe in the future, Google will continue to release these updates and
operating system releases (hardware supporting of course) to the users of legacy
equipment. The g1 was updated as far as its physical specifications would
allow. The lack of the Android 2.0 operating system on the G1 was a result of
the memory limitations in the phone. The G1 only has 256Mb of internal storage.
The droid has very similar specifications to the Nexus One with exception of the
processor, but the 500 MHz can easily handle the android operating system and
has been under clocked for battery life so this speed can safely be increased
with a slight decrease in battery life to support a more processor intensive
operating system.
I am also pretty sure, that when nexus one is released, the droid will be thrown
by the wayside by Verizon as have all of its predecessors. At least android
users will have the suppport of Google to ensure that they will be very happy
with their phones for a long time coming.
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