Motorola Droid Pro Puts BlackBerry on Notice

Right now, at least 31% of the smartphones, in the field are BlackBerry handsets. Research in Motion (RIM) should be feeling pretty good about this right? Wrong. Those numbers are based, at least in part, on all the BlackBerry curves that were all but given away over the last few years. There are in those numbers probably a goodly number of enterprise businesses that have standardized on the platform, as well. However with a surging Android handset market (numbers show most new handset buyers are Android customers) and now the business-ready Motorola Droid Pro, RIM could see its fortunes change in a hurry.
I've been carrying around a BlackBerry Torch 9800 for a couple of months. It's a good qwerty/touch-screen combo phone. Featuring the radically overhauled BlackBerry OS 6, the interface is a refreshing change from all BlackBerry phones I've used before. The capacitive screen is relatively large and responsive; the hidden keyboard is a bit cramped, but still highly usable. This is the phone that wipes away all those horrible BlackBerry Storm memories. However, I'm not sure it's enough to help RIM hold on.

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The just announced Motorola Droid Pro doesn't break any design barriers. In fact, it doesn't even bother to hide its qwerty keyboard. But with its simple look and visible keyboard, and promised security policies and strong Microsoft Exchange support, the Droid Pro is clearly built for business. Physical and visible keys, by the way, scream business. I think users and IT managers assume all-screen devices (even those with slide-away keyboards) are really intended for media consumption and play, with productivity only a secondary consideration. As an Android phone, the Motorola Droid Pro already has a leg up on anything RIM produces. I'm not sure that this is for entirely rational reasons. The market has simply fallen in love with Android. Its marketshare is growing faster than RIM and Apple's. Manufacturers are developing and delivering Android phones in bunches. Better yet, they're even starting to get their act together on platform consistency. The Droid Pro, for example, will ship next month with Android 2.2 ("Froyo"). As far as I'm concerned, any Android device that doesn't ship with 2.0 or later really isn't worth considering.
There is, for reasons I can't quite discern, a new bias against anything RIM delivers. In any other day and age, the Torch would've been considered a home run. It looks remarkably like the once-lauded Palm Pre. However that device came out a couple of years ago and we all know what happened to Palm and its WebOS. The Torch is a great business phone, but it's not entirely cutting edge. The screen resolution is, at 360-by-480, far lower than any of the latest 960-by-480 (iPhone) or 800-by-480 (EVO 4G) smartphone screens available today. Granted, the Torch has a much smaller screen. At least in this regard, the Droid Pro's 3.1-inch 320-by-480 touch screen offers less than the Torch.
That the Droid Pro will launch on the Verizon network is a factor here, too. RIM's BlackBerry Torch arrived exclusively, much to my chagrin and maybe Verizon's, on the AT&T network. Yes, AT&T is the fastest 3G network in the U.S., but also the most unreliable. Where does reliability matter most? Business. Yeah, AT&T got the sexier phone, but Verizon just got the one you and your IT manager will probably rely on.
Motorola appears to understand something that I think RIM missed in its delivery of the Torch 9800. When I first got my hands on the BlackBerry device, I was still carrying around an Apple iPhone 4. The screen real estate and resolution was one notable difference, but the one that caught me the most was the alarming disparity in performance. With its custom A4 processor, the iPhone 4 is all smooth sailing. I never waited for anything to happen on screen; when you have a touch interface, anything less than instant response is unacceptable. The BlackBerry Torch clearly suffers from its 624 MHz CPU. So while the BlackBerry OS 6 browser puts the previous version to shame, performance issues abound. Mostly I see this in screen reorientation and pinching and zooming Web pages. I swear I can almost hear gears turning while the Torch sorts out each operation.
The Droid Pro will ship with a 1GHz processor. Not only will that make a real difference in performance, but it sends a message to potential customers: This phone means business.
When the Droid Pro arrives sometime next month from Verizon with a business friendly-look, enterprise-level software chops and performance that should make businesses and others take notice, how will RIM respond? On the off chance, Motorola's blowing smoke on the Droid Pro's business prowess (maybe, for instance, it doesn't have the centralized manageability of a BlackBerry), RIM might be able to ignore or sidestep the risk. But what if the Droid Pro is just right for business? RIM should plan for the worst case scenario and get busy delivering an updated BlackBerry Torch on whatever network you want, today.

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