Motorola Droid Pro: First Impressions
A quick story about how we were even able to come about this event. Phandroid – being the undecided crew that we normally prove ourselves to be – didn’t know if we were even going to attend CTIA Enterprise and Apps in San Francisco. As you already know by now, we decided to. The problem with that is we had no idea what to expect when we flew out here and we were unaware of any of the events going on around us outside of what CTIA officially listed. Luckily, our good friend Taylor from Android & Me gave us quite the helping hand and helped us gain access to a private Motorola event on such short notice. Major kudos to him for that.
Anywho, there was a Motorola event. You know that part. What you didn’t know was that the Motorola Droid Pro was going to be announced tonight. We’ve all heard of it before, but we’d never seen it. It wasn’t confirmed. And we weren’t even 100% on what to expect with the device once Verizon and Motorola were finally ready to reveal it to everyone.
When Motorola’s co-CEO Sanjay Jha first excitedly announced the Motorola Droid Pro, one thing jumped into our mental lobe: this is for the Blackberry folks. The form factor identifies perfectly with the crowd this is aimed at, they’ve packed it with enough security features for anyone’s workplace to approve of it. What’s more is that it becomes the phone that most Blackberry users have become accustomed to over the years: a world phone.
We only elected to spend a few short moments with the phone as we’ll have plenty of time to get our hands on it over the next few days, but the impression we walked away with was nothing but positive. Everything a Blackberry user could want out of a phone – aside from the insanely popular (but we still don’t see why) Blackberry Messenger – was present. The form factor was that traditional candy bar we’ve all come to know and love with a fully-exposed QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard itself performed wonderfully in my few seconds of typing on it. Track and feel was great – even if the keys weren’t offset – and each key really made a point to say “hey, don’t skip over me! You know you want to press me!”
Above that was a 3.1 HVGA touchscreen ready for all of the touching it can handle. I know what you’re thinking: “Seriously, Motorola? No high resolution screen?” Stop right there, because you have to think about who they’re aiming for with this phone. Blackberry users haven’t really needed the greatest specs that can be packed into such a small package. Think about all of the low resolution screens, the lack of memory (but that’s not a problem with 8GB of internal storage and 2GB of ROM.), and the slow processors (also not a problem here.) that Blackberry users have coped with over the years.
I would even dare to say that the low resolution of the Motorola Droid Pro is more of a plus than a negative as it really allows that 1GHz processor inside to do more work with less strain on its back. It doesn’t need to draw as many pixels so you’re getting an even smoother experience than what you would get on the Droid 2 or the Droid X. I was blown away when I picked this phone up as I thought back to the times I had with my brother’s Motorola Droid 2. That was a time where I thought “are you sure this isn’t just running at 800MHz? 600MHz?” But that was with MOTOBLUR, so I won’t knock Texas Instruments for that. And now I see where TI’s processor can truly shine.
The form factor and the specs are only part of a very big equation, though. The business users that this is blatantly aimed at have been looking for the final nail they need to forever close the coffin on their aging Blackberries. That nail is security. With the Droid Pro, gone are the days where your place of work is forced to deny you use of your favorite Android phone because it lacks VPN and other security features required by enterprise groups. Motorola’s made sure that no business user will be left in the dark if they buy this phone as it makes up for what Android currently lacks in the security department (something we hope will be fixed in forthcoming iterations of Android.)
Another thing business users love and need is the ability to travel beyond our country’s borders to use the phone. Sure, this isn’t a problem for users who own phones on GSM networks, but those who are forced to stick with Verizon (which many are through corporate discounts and other restrictions) will enjoy the ability to skip the country without having to worry about losing their ability to place calls, send text messages, or consume bits and bytes of data. This is something that became quite the trend late in Verizon’s Blackberry fetish and we’re glad to see it resurfacing here with Motorola and Android.
Again, we didn’t spend too much time with the device as we had to skidaddle to another event going down tonight, but we saw enough to get excited and can’t wait to get more hands-on time with it tomorrow when CTIA’s main show floor opens up. We’ll have some tasty video for you to chow down on as soon as we can get them rendered and uploaded. Until then, look forward to more from us coming form CTIA over the next few days, and look forward to the Motorola Droid Pro coming to Verizon Wireless this November.