Verizon Wireless stores will soon have more Droids hanging around than the Mos Eisley spaceport, with the latest of the Star Wars-themed devices hitting the shelves on Friday.
Motorola’s Droid 4, the latest incarnation of the original Droid released in November 2009, will cost $ 199 with a two-year contract. Like its predecessors, the smartphone has a full QWERTY slide-out keyboard, but it now packs a dual-core, 1.2-gigahertz processor and is the latest device capable of surfing Verizon’s high-speed, long-term evolution data network.
Droid Fatigue?
The Droid 4, introduced last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is only a half-inch thick.
In addition to Motorola, Samsung and HTC also make Droid devices, which Verizon considers its top-shelf Android-based smartphones, offering a superior user interface.
And the nation’s top carrier seems to have no reservations about expanding the lineup on a regular basis, as fast as its partners can make them.
Are they risking Droid fatigue? Not likely, says analyst Charles King of Pund-IT.
“The smartphone audience is large and diverse enough that it can absorb or tolerate more updates and new versions than many product categories, so long as they’re properly targeted,” King said.
The Droid 4, he said, is aimed at users who prefer slide-out keyboards, while other devices, such as HTC’s Droid Incredible, are entirely touchscreen devices.
That doesn’t mean, however, that too many similar devices and upgrades can’t confuse the market.
“As the success of Apple’s iPhone 4S demonstrates, there are huge potential benefits in delivering a new device with a true killer app — in Apple’s case, Siri,” King said. “By comparison, simple OS upgrades or nominally improved features can appear a bit dowdy.”
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