By Just like the chin vs. no chin feud that face Hero fans, there seems to be a dividing line of sorts about the gold trim and d-pad on the Motorola Droid. If you’re NOT a fan of the gold, have some loot to spare, and enjoy taking risks you might have yourself a peek at this EBay Auction:
As you can see, at the time of this writing the bidding is at $495 and the seller – at least from the EBay history – seems to be reputable. Unfortunately only one of you can snag this. But what exactly is “this”…?
The seller claims this is one of only 5 prototypes designed specifically for Motorola Engineers and is working and ready for activation. Three key differences from other Droids are noted:
- Chrome bezel instead of black
- Silver buttons instead of gold
- Enhanced LED lighting on touchscreen buttons
We’ve already seen the Droid taken apart so there isn’t any reason an enterprising little scammer couldn’t have taken the Droid apart, repainted and touched up some key pieces, put humpty dumpty together again and sold it. But based on the pictures included this LOOKS like a real Droid:
I like how it says “not available for sale” when it is clearly… available for sale. There are only 3 days left on the auction… do you think it will get pulled before it gets sold and shipped? And I guess more importantly… real or fake?
[Via Engadget]
damn, why couldn’t this have been the production version?
oh well, the gold doesn’t bother me too much and i kindof like the black bezel better.
do you think they might start selling a silver version for real?
Just bear in mind you can be prosecuted for receiving stolen goods if you buy it. They don’t etch “MOTOROLA RESTRICTED PROPERTY” and a serial number into the front for no reason.
I don’t care what colour the trims are! Just give us a UK release!!
I have to say though that this looks slick. I’m not averse to the gold trims, but I do think the silver looks better.
Also those brighter buttons look nice! Might get annoying or distracting when looking at the screen if they were on that bright all the time though..
Try as they will, and try as they might, who steals me gold won’t live through the night.
If that is a prototype, then it would have an engineering bootloader, wouldn’t it?
There is a difference in stolen property and restricted ownership of property. It really depends on what terms the person obtained the property which we cannot know for sure.
LOL, check the seller’s recent purchases and you’ll see that he just bought this off of ebay by a guy claiming to be selling all 5. Looks like he paid $349.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250532592207#ht_2093wt_1165
verizon probably blacklisted the ESN. Seriously, its 200 bucks, even cheaper other places. why would someone waste their money on this.
Ok to me someone with an ebay rating of 30 isn’t quite trustworthy to me. Not only that but if you look in the comments this person got that rating by being a good buyer not a good seller they only sold 1 item, a MyTouch 3G. To me its a scam.
This is most definitely real, I used to work for Mot and had several of these. There for sure are more than 5 of them in existence, they are an old revision of the hardware but it won’t make any difference to the end user.
I can also confirm that this is 100% stolen property, and belongs to Motorola. They had a system for tracking the ownership of each phone, though it was pretty easy to circumvent so I doubt they will be able to track back who stole this phone. Whatever manager’s name is on the tracker for this phone is about to have a real bad day though…
Aren’t we supposed to be talking about what we think about the different color scheme and not the trustworthiness of this deal in particular?
Anywho, I like the silver as well as the Gold/Brown sugar versions. Personally I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the gold version, I think it looks old school. The silver is okay…but I still prefer the current rendition.
Make new friends but keep the old…one is silver and the other’s gold.
I’m still trying really really hard to understand why this auction is being reported on by major media outlets across the internet. I can sort of understand why Phandroid would report on it. Seriously though…its an overpriced PROTOTYPE that is not much different than the real thing. Bet you the ESN doesn’t work like the real thing though, watch out!
What is up with the myopia pictures? Isn’t anyone bothered by the out of focus images?
When I buy something off ebay the pix better be clear and sharp so I can see what I’m buying!
How can he claim “What I can guarantee is that the ESN is clear, the Touch screen and all buttons work. And the WiFi Bluetooth and other radios work”, yet tries to sell it as “New, Never Opened”? How can it never have been opened, and he still claims all those things work?
I still think instead of gold or silver it seriously should have been red. My opinion of course.
A buddy of mine who works for Motorola has one of these. It also has a volume switch on the side that is non-functional, and it just received a software update on Saturday, giving it a slightly different lock/unlock screen. It doesn’t come with a 16GB microSD, though, and it is not a Verizon phone. IMHO, you get a better deal with a contract from Verizon Wireless.
what an idiot this guy is, or at least the guy who got issued the device. Why anyone in there right mind would post pics with a serial number that can get back traced is a moron and deserves to be fired or go to jail. However the device is real that is a given, and it is most certainly a VZW model of it. At best tho it would be worth about $150 as that is not final build and it will have issues.
And just becasue it is a prototype does not mean the ESN is no good, odds are it is a given to be good to go. I had family who worked for Moto and had gotten many devices over the years to test/try that are marked like this and they activate just fine.
Keep in mind, if anyone’s willing to take the risk, that while the ESN is probably not blacklisted it also might not be fully functional. I’ve tested engineering units of many phones recently and most of them have had identical ESN and serial numbers (unique numbers are out of scope for lab devices according to the FCC) which means they’ll get on the network but have all sorts of funky issues including the market not working.
I can also vouch that this is a real prototype phone. Don’t hold your breath on an engineering bootloader, however. A lot of the earlier revisions still had regular builds and bootloaders. There were a lot more than 5, however, closer to 500. Motorola devs had them, as did Google Android devs. The keyboard keys are a little deeper than the normal Sholes, and chances are this phone is running an early build of Andorid. The last time I saw a phone like this, the camera took pics with the HP logo floating all over the frame as it was a beta driver. ESN is most likely blacklisted, and Motorola can go after you for possession of stolen property. Will they, prolly not, but aside from being a collector’s thing, anybody who buys this with the intent to use it should really think twice.
BRONZE not GOLD
I haven’t seen one person get that right yet, anywhere.
So do all of these comments mean that a found Droid cannot be activated?