Motorola Droid sizzles in the US but fizzles in the UK

In the UK, leading wireless carrier O2 said it decided not to stock Motorola Droid after it conducted earlier tests on the device while its German partner T-Mobile said it has no current plans of offering the device.

Orange, the third largest wireless carrier in the UK did not confirm whether they would be selling the Droid but did confirm that they are already selling the Motorola Dext, which has become a big hit already.

Bigger rival Vodafone did not officially confirm whether they would be selling the most-awaited device from the Motorola stable but a Vodafone official, on condition of anonymity, said the company has decided not to sell the device at the moment.

Now, this is bad news for Motorola as the company has been betting big on the Droid for lifting its sales in the UK.

Currently, the UK mobile phone market is dominated by O2, which controls 27 percent of the market, followed by Vodafone with 25 percent, Orange with 22 percent and T-Mobile with 15 percent. The 'Big Four' of the UK control nearly 90 percent of the wireless market in the UK and if all of them decide not to stock on the Droid, Motorola can wave its dreams of turning its fortunes around goodbye.

But is the Droid all that bad?

If Motorola's ad blitz "Everything iDon't, Droid Does" is to be believed, the Droid is a far superior device than the market leader iPhone and any other smartphone in the market.

And, why not? The 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 multitouch WVGA display (with 854x480 pixel resolution), has a slider Qwerty keyboard in landscape mode (the Droid promises precise, quick typing), 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, 4x digital zoom, LED flash, night-shot capability and video recorder (at 720x480 pixel @ 24fps), 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, a 3-axis accelerometer (a crucial sensor that take advantage of tilting - and allows great gaming and use of the phone in landscape mode) and a 3.5mm headphone jack.