Meet the Motorola Droid, Verizons First Google Android Smartphone

by Michelle Maisto

The Motorola Droid features a 3.7-inch high-resolution touch screen with a width of 854 pixels, to reduce the need for side-to-side panning. It boasts a total of 400,000 pixels. The iPhone, by comparison, offers 480 by 320 pixels, for a total of 153,600 pixels.

Unlike the touch-screen-only iPhone, the Droid features a slide-out, four-row QWERTY keyboard. There’s also a multiwindow HTML browser, support for Gmail and Exchange, a 5-megapixel camera (the camera on the iPhone 3GS is 3 megapixels) and voice-activated Google searching.

Unlike the iPhone, the Droid has a battery that can be removed. It also features GPS and is the first device with Google Maps Navigation, which offers turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free complement to Google Maps. Users can interact with it using voice instructions, such as telling it where they want to go.

The Droid’s screen can be customized, and users will have access to what Verizon says are hundreds of available widgets and more than 12,000 applications. Like the Palm Pre—but unlike the iPhone—the Droid lets users navigate between up to six open applications at once.