Motorola, energized by the success of its Droid smartphones, is taking on some big fish. The company's just-announced Droid Pro is clearly targeting RIM's BlackBerry phones and their vast business user base, and Moto thinks it has the key ingredient to do it: security.
The Droid Pro has a number of features that make it more secure than other smartphones: First, you can remotely wipe the phone — not exactly a new feature for smartphones, even for Android, but the Droid Pro has the added bonus of being able to wipe the memory card as well. On top of that, the Pro will offer device encryption, starting next year, which means that even if the phone is stolen and the password hacked, evildoers still won't be able to read the contents.
BlackBerry devices do much of the same, even going so far as to add another layer of encryption on the network side, ensuring intercepted messages can't be read either. The Pro doesn't offer this feature, but if a company wants it, there are third-party solutions.
Will businesses go for the Droid Pro? They might — a big weakness of BlackBerry in the smartphone market is its dearth of apps, with only 10,000 or so in BB App World to the Android Market's 80,000 (still, no one comes close to Apple's App Store at 250,000). And the candybar form factor is nice too, sporting a reasonably big screen (3.1 inches) and a full QWERTY keyboard (most BB phones with a full keyboard are 2.5 inches). There's also a speedy 1GHz chip running Android 2.2 (with Adobe Flash) and an autofocus camera with LED flash.
What do you think? Would you rather do your business on a BlackBerry or the Droid Pro? Is Android that much of a draw?
Motorola, via Engadget and CNET
