You have probably seen the iDon’t commercials. The first time I saw it, I was like “What?” As luck would have it, I had my laptop in front of me so I went to Droid’s website. There wasn’t much there – just a sign up for email. But guess what? I signed up. So Verizon’s marketing worked great for me!
POLL: Will you buy the new Droid from Verizon? Vote YES or Vote NO
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October 30 is the release date for the new Droid. The Droid commercial has been a direct slap at the iPhone and its shortcomings such as not having a real keyboard, not running application simultaneously, and not allowing open development. It seems that Verizon’s new product will produce a Droid vs. iPhone challenge to see which is better.
Since the iPhone has such a lead in market share and popularity, it will take this new product sometime to catch up – if it ever does. But it always nice for companies to have competition because it forces them to continuously improve their products.
But in the short term, Verizon has done a terrific job of getting people excited over the Droid. Searches for the Droid are consistently in the top 20 in Google which interestingly enough is providing the operating system for the product. And Verizon pulled no punches in clearly mocking the iPhone.
They have also done the same with the “There’s a map for that” commercial that is clearly targeting AT&T. In fact, one substantial advantage that will help against the iPhone is that Verizon has superior coverage throughout the United States compared to AT&T.
Here are some of the specs on the Droid:
3.7” capacitive display (854 x 480 pixels) 5-megapixel camera with a flash, autofocus, and a video recorder GPS Wi-Fi Bluetooth 2.0 QWERTY keyboard
A funny thing happened the other day though. Motorola “accidentally” had pictures and detailed specifications of the new Droid on their website for a short time. Quickly realizing the “mistake”, they pulled the content down, but not before several bloggers found the information and passed it around.
Personally I think this was another marketing tactic by Motorola. I mean, if a company is going to spend millions of dollars on building up such a whirlwind of curiosity and desire, are they going to accidentally post this information on their website ahead of time? I don’t think so. And this page was so conveniently missing some of the most important pieces – the price and availability.
So while we are not quite sure how good Verizon is at making a smartphone, we do know they are pretty darn good at marketing one.
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