Motorola’s Droid is the first phone to use the latest release of Android, called Éclair, which features free turn-by-turn directions from Google and sophisticated speech recognition. The biggest problem was the balance between design, which was once a Motorola hallmark, and the phone’s performance. “When you are trying to make something small and powerful, everything is a tradeoff,” Mr. Osterloh explained. “You have to iterate the design thousands of times to get it right.”
Even a small change, like the color of the paint, means that the design of the several radio antennas embedded into the phone’s case have to be rearranged.
Verizon worried that the angular design of what was to be the Droid appealed more to men than women. Motorola quickly rounded some of the phone’s edges and added a rubberized backing to create a softer feel.
It’s encouraging to see an engineering-driven company like Motorola taking design so seriously. Because of Apple, other companies’ products have to be as pretty on the outside as they are well-built on the inside.