Droid gets hands-on, Verizon says robot sidekick will best iPhone

Over the weekend, Verizon taunted the iPhone with television ads featuring the phrase “iDon’t” followed by a series of things the iPhone on rival network AT&T can’t do. This morning, we are treated to an early hands-on of the phone to perhaps confirm some of the ads claims. The ad encourages viewers to visit droiddoes.com, presumably where they’d find a phone from Verizon that can do those things. I still have to pinch myself that they are this excited about a Motorola phone.

The Motorola Droid, a touchscreen phone with slide out QWERTY keyboard is the new hope for a home run on the Verizon network. Boy Genius got some hands-on time and gushed at the phones amazing speed, beautiful screen, thin lines and ease of use. To sum it up:

“the Droid, even in its non-final form, is the most impressive phone we’ve used since the iPhone. It’s positively amazing”

Verizon’s TV spot points out some of the iPhone flaws: no simultaneous apps, no night images, no real keyboard, no open development, etc. Verizon’s website touts the things Droid does: high definition, multitasking, speech recognition, video, tunes, 10,000 apps and more. The tactic is interesting in pointing out the differences. While I’d rather see Droid stand on its own, Verizon is under pressure from the iPhone, so they succumb to the Instinct-like comparisons.

It seems Google had a bigger hand in this phone than perhaps most Android phones. It seems Verizon brought Google in directly to work with Motorola down to Google calling out specs of the phone for total optimization. The Droid does not have the Blur skin that Motorola is so proud of, rather it runs Android 2.0.

While the hands-on was on a pre production device, we believe the high points of the phone will remain unchanged. This is going to be a important device on the Verizon network.

Read [Boy Genius Report] and [droiddoes]

Image credit: Boy Genius Report