Can Droid help turn Motorola's fortunes around?

Ever since Motorola released the ultra-thin, ultra-smart Razr, which took the world by storm (Razr, which is not a smartphone, has sold over 100 million units worldwide till date), it failed to come up with a worthy successor and despite several launches that included Rockr, Slvr and the company's first Window Mobile-based device, the Q, Motorola's popularity as a handset maker was on the wane and a time came when the company even considered spinning off its loss-making mobile handset division.

But ever since Motorola was bitten by the Android bug, it got kicking and spent millions of dollars advertising how Droid is a better option than iPhone ("Everything iDon't, Droid Does").

But can Droid live up to the hype and more importantly, can it help turnaround the company's fortunes?

In a sneak peak, IBTimes found that Droid is vastly superior to previous Android-based phones like G1, myTouch and most recently, the Cliq, which lacked in three key areas: hardware, user interface, and network power.

Droid runs on Google's latest mobile platform Android 2.0 (hence Droid, duh) and the phone, which is slightly thicker than iPhone, is powered by the super-fast ARM Cortex A8 TI OMAP3430 processor (the core of both iPhone and Palm Pre), boasts of a huge 3.7-inch capacitive multi-touch WVGA display (with 854x480 resolution), has a slider Qwerty keyboard in landscape mode (Droid promises precise, quick typing), 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, 4x digital zoom, LED flash, night-shot capability and video recorder, supports multi-touch gestures (allows you to flick and swirl your fingers across the screen for intuitive navigation. It also allows you to scroll and flip through web pages, photos, spreadsheets and more), EV-DO, 512MB storage, 256MB RAM, microSD/microSDH card slot (a 16GB microSD ships with the phone but up to 32GB can be supported), supports multiple audio and video formats, GPS, USB, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, accelerometer and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Droid also reportedly rivals the latest iPhone 3GS in web page loading speeds, syncs your Facebook contacts and has a better email interface than iPhone (it lets you flag multiple emails as read or unread).

Droid also has an improved browser and Microsoft Exchange compatibility is reportedly built-in.

The smartphone also boasts of speech recognition capabilities, advanced multitasking capabilities and interchangeable batteries that has enough juice to power the smartphone up to 6.4 hours (talk time) and 270 hours (standby time).

Droid also supports Google Voice that lets you route calls more efficiently, control who can contact you, and transcribe messages, unlike iPhone.