First of all, I went to the Verizon store to try one, and simply WONT let you do that. They say you have to buy before you try. Well that is a serious weakness. They let me play with a dummy phone though. They said this was not hurting sales… well that was on day 2. Of course the people watching for the release day were hungry to get in the game. Verizon was 4th out of the 4 majors to get into the touch smartphone game, so that is not a surprise.

The other disappointments I will mention all come from the video below, all because I am not going to buy before I try. As a G1 user myself with my memory and CPU pretty maxed out, I was expecting the Droid to hit the market with lots of headroom on both fronts. Apparently, Motorala did not do much improvement here. In fact, the increase in weight of the OS and display resolution is greater than the increase in CPU power over the G1. In looking at the video, I agree that the G1 keyboard is probably better, but that may just be the prejudice of a G1 owner talking.

All in all, the Droid is great phone and I want EVERY last Verizon customer to go out right now and get one. Get one for a loved one for Christmas. Now. You will love it and for $199 (after rebate) and
for $100/mo you will have enough airtime along with unlimited texting and 3G data to rock with the rest of us.

Join the revolution Verizon customers!

The key to the breakthrough is in Androids willingness to open up the bluetooth controller to app developers. Once this is an actuality, an app can use bluetooth to activate the same infrared FOB ekey that currently works fine for blackberry. GE/Supra is apparently willing to make these apps as soon as this capability is opened up. iPhone and Palm are going to be behind the times very soon here on this front, and I do truly hope that GE/Supra makes an announcement soon. I am sure they would see it as an important priority, as they will ship more FOB’s and make more bank.

I know there are quite a few realtors out there following this issue, all waiting to purchase whatever smart touchscreen phone is the first to work with the FOB. If for one am hopeful it will indeed by Verizon and Android. Verizon needs a phone at the table that can work with elegantly our app that will be used by thousands of home buyers within 90 days.

One thing we enjoyed right way when we heard about this was the aggressive superiority to iPhone campaign that Verizon put forward, which I believe is going to tip the touch-based smartphone adoption curve even more rapidly than the fact alone that Verizon users will now have a choice to join the rest of us in the first place.

Here are the specs, courtesy of Verizon Forums
Motorola Droid Specs
* OMAP3430 – 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX 530 GPU + 430MHz C64x+ DSP + ISP (Image Signal Processor)
* Dimensions 60.00 x 115.80 x 13.70 mm
* Weight 169 g
* Battery Li-ion 1400 mAh.
* Standby 450 hours, talk time 420 minutes
* 3.7-inch touch-sensitive display with a resolution of 854×480 pixels, 16 million color depth. Physical screen size is 45.72 mm by 81.34 mm.
* 512MB/256MB ROM/RAM
* microSD / microSDHC expansion slot
* Camera: 5.0 megapixel with autofocus and video recorder
* Connectivity: USB2.0, 3.5mm audio jack, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, Wi-Fi
* Supported audio formats: AMR-NB/WB, MP3, PCM / WAV, AAC, AAC +, eAAC +, WMA
* Supported video formats: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, WMV
* GPS navigation
* Package Contents: Phone Motorola Sholes, battery, charger, USB cable, 8GB MicroSD memory card and other literature.

Click here to see Verizon droid screenshots of how the phone will browse you through the web and specifically homesafari.us

Android is on it’s way to make 100 phones that compete well with the iPhone 2010.

Today, we tested for the first time how the app runs on the Palm Pre. The people at the Sprint Store here in Vancouver were gracious enough to allow me 30 minutes to hog the device and browse around on HomeSafari.us. The site worked great right away and I was able to get around easily just like the iPhone and G1. The site sizing did shift around on me quite a bit though, and I discovered that we’ll have some extra work to do to make sure the greedy cache on the Pre does not show un-updated content– especially on the Capture List. Without going into a lot of detail on the technical differences of what it takes to design differently to make your mobile webdev project a success, I will just say that I am pleased for now on our progress and am confident HomeSafari will be a pleasure for home buyers all around. If you are a mobile designer reading this, just shoot me a comment and I’ll send you some info on how to make the iPhone iui behave well for all mobile webkit browsers.

If you are wondering about the Pre and are skeptical whether it will contend with the iPhone, this video should should bring you around.

We had to set up twitter, let Google find us in the last 15% of our developemnt, so just be aware that we are not done here yet. You can look around and even offer ideas on this post for the new portal that will open and include every real estate listing in the Pacific Northwest available on the iPhone, with special services for realtors, partners, and especially.. the buyers!

Please enter your cell number into the form below and we’ll send you the launch announcement and any early sign-up offers we have in the making.

(yes, this was set for late August at first, but we had a few delays. The Seattle properties are indeed online now and new features are present that make your process of tracking homes in your capture list much more powerful. Share a captured listing with your family, friends and realtor contacts today!)