According to Androidandme, the highly praised Motorola Droid ships with a 512 MB ROM, which means that the Droid only has 256 MB of storage available for apps. That’s pretty pathetic for a phone being positioned as a true iPhone replacement.
As we’ve argued before, the differences in hardware amongst competing smartphones will eventually begin to converge, and the key differentiating factor going forward will be software, and in particular the size and quality of competing mobile app stores. Right now, Apple has a commanding lead with well over 100,000 apps, and it shows no sign of ceding control of that lead anytime soon. But even if the Android Marketplace, by some unforeseen miracle, begins to give the iTunes App Store a run for its money, what good is it really when Droid users, for example, are limited to only256 MB of storage? That’s childs play. Think about it – some of the more popular iPhone games come in at well over 100 MB. Myst, for example, technically takes up over 720 MB of space, but in actually requires 1.5 GB of space. And as developers continue to churn out more advanced and layered software, large app sizes will become more and more commonplace.
The internal specs on the Droid are impressive, and its 3.7-inch screen is reportedly a sight to see, but it’s akin to having a hardware impressing MP3 player than can only store 50 songs at a time. What’s even the point?
Many people have been quick to place the Droid on the same playing field as the iPhone, but given its inability to house a large number of apps, or even a few apps that check in with hefty payloads, how can you even make that kind of comparison?
November 9th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I am sympathetic to your point of view about the iPhone and Droid, but there has been a lot of discussion about the issue already on a variety of websites. You need to update your analysis to account for the 16GB SD memory card that comes with the Droid and the possibility that only a small part of each game application would have to be installed on the phone because the data could be made available to the processor from the SD memory card. I don’t know the extent to which this claim is accurate, but it has been made.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
The claim is wrong.
I have 1.8GB of apps on my iPhone. Many of them are apps that are not even possible on Android.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:48 am
I love my touch and all….but iPhone OS is similiar. it only allows 11 pages of apps. WTF IS THAT BULL?!
November 10th, 2009 at 7:37 am
@Benawsome
You can sync as many apps as you want onto the iPhone. For the apps that don’t fit on the 11 pages, just search for them using the Spotlight search. So, that gives you 11 pages of ‘favorites’ and then just search for the rest.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:53 am
the 256 only applies to the executable portion o fthe app, anything else can be stored/written to the sd card:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/09/droid-does-only-have-256mb-of-storage-for-apps/
November 10th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
While I love my iPhone I HATE AT&T.
I am sick & tired of all the dropped calls and
no service. I’m in NYC!!!
I’m leaving for the droid and praying that verizon
gets the iPhone one day.
AT&T is a tad better than T-Mobile.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:37 am
At least my Droid won’t blow up in my pocket!