Droid, the new smart phone straight from the ...90s?

A slide out keyboard.

Really? Motorola guys, are you kidding me? Do you ever get out of your office and look around? Have you not seen what is happening in the consumer electronics marketplace? Even laptops and PC use touch screens, let alone a ton of mobile devices. And what do you do? You release yet another hyped iPhone killer with a UX from the 90s. Wow, talk about living in denial.

The iPhone needs competition!
This one goes out to all mobile device manufacturers: please get your acts together, accept what the iPhone did to the industry and...move on! You want to build an iPhone killer? Here is what you need to focus on:

1. get over memory concerns, solid state memory is getting cheaper and cheaper, put plenty of it on it and get over it, you will not make your money playing nickle and dime on memory. Why? Because that ship has sailed, today you need to at least match the iPhone and I am ready to bet 90% of smart phone users could not care less to have an SD card in their phone. Have a look at the iPhone demographics, who do you think the audience is? The cashier at the local grocery store who saves his paychecks for months to buy the flat screen TV at Walmart, that's who. That is how you make the big numbers.
   
2. get over offering a ton of features that make your hardware not backward or forward compatible with Android releases. Fragmentation of your product offering is your death sentence. An iPhone Edge today can run the same OS as an iPhone 3Gs. Beat that. Can't? Good, get a clue and get busy. That means you Erickson!
   
3. superior UX, the device should have the same user guide as an iPhone: none. It is so intuitive to use you do not need one. Don't know how? Hire Interaction Designers and get with it.
   
4. Establish a supported development community and the keyword here is *supported*. You cannot have one store for provider A and one for provider B and ...no, no, no! Developers will not come. They have to spend their time (=money) to embrace your platform, you have to make it as painless as possible!
   
5. A way for app developers to digitally sign their software so piracy is not possible! Sharing is all fine and dandy but at the end of the day money has to exchange hands, developers need to pay rent too. Apple got it and that is why there are anywhere from million dollar software houses to high school students making money selling apps. That is how is done, pay attention. It is really not that hard.

It will cost millions of dollars to do the above but the more time goes by, the more it will cost to close the gap with Apple. Stop spending money on hype (the Droid campaign surely cost more than a pretty penny) and get busy building a valuable alternative or get out of the business.

[Update] rumor has it Google is working on a branded Android based phone that will not have a physical keyboard and that will not have software compatibility issues or product fragmentation. Now that *is* the way to go! Let's hope rumors are true in this case, please see this link.