Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The most important Android phone”.
We are 10 years into the Android era, and I’ve been talking a lot about how it’s dominant now. There’s over two billion users and it has over 80 % worldwide market share.. Now, in a previous video, we looked at why Android got started, but this week I have a different question.. How did Android get so big? If you take yourself all the way back to 2009, it was very much not a sure thing that Android would become the king of mobile.. In fact, what you were looking at back then was like a six or seven-horse race..
Far out in the lead was Symbian which was dominant in Europe, but almost nothing here in the US., The iPhone was getting a little bit of traction. Blackberry was doing. Okay and Android was like a blip like a 4 % blip.. Now, in hindsight, it’s really easy to say why Symbian and Windows, Mobile and BlackBerry and Linux and yes, Linux, phone existed and webOS why they all crashed and burned..
They all happened for kind of different reasons, but today I wan na focus on one of the biggest reasons they all went down in flames instead of staying competitive and that reason is. [, Robotic Voice, ] Droid. More so than the G1. This right here is the real Android OG and there’s a lot of really notable things to talk about with this device..
First off it was a big deal for Motorola, which hadn’t had a hit since the Razr flip phone, and it was before the company fell on hard times and then got bought by Google and then got sold by Google and now just kind of makes bog standard. Android phones now that it’s owned by Lenovo., No, this phone right here with its little flip out thing here. This was the big comeback and oh my gosh. What a comeback. It’s hard to remember now, but this thing was the pinnacle of tech.. I mean just look at the crazy angles on these things and it had turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps, which was very rare back then, and it launched with Android 2.0..
It had a very big screen. It had multiple buttons, little five-way, removable battery a whole bunch of stuff. And, if you didn’t know, Google had a hand in developing this phone.. I’Ve even heard some Googlers referred to the Droid as the unofficial first Nexus device even before the Nexus One.
In 2010., This phone was metal., It was metal as hell., And that brings me to the real reason that the Droid was the moment when Android started to get big and that’s because of Verizon. ( suspenseful music, ) (, robotic noise ). What in the world is that ( intense tune? ) You see back in 2009, carriers had a lot more control over what phones got on their networks and they still did most of the marketing work on them. And to be clear, I’m mostly talking about the US right now., But the US was also kind of Ground zero for the smartphone wars. Sure the iPhone was getting big, but it was exclusive just to AT .