August 10, 2010, 7:43 AM — The good ship Verizon ought to be at the bottom of the sea by now, considering all the leaks it has. Still, I can't really hold it against them when the news is this good.
Boy Genius Report claims to have gotten a bilge-full (OK, I'll stop with the nautical metaphors now) of data about Verizon's future plans, and it sounds like Verizon's support for Android isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Will they have room for an iPhone beside all this Android goodness? Time will tell.
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So we have the Droid X already on the market and the Droid 2 coming this week. Turns out that Droid 2 is going to have a 1 Ghz processor after all. So is it the ultimate Droid? Apparently not, because BGR says that a Droid Pro with a 1.3 Ghz CPU and a 4" screen is coming this November. But maybe you're happy with your phone and what you really want is an Android tablet with 3G. Two are in the works, a 7" model from Samsung and a 10" model from Motorola. The Motorola tablet will be running Android 3 so it won't be out until sometime next winter; it's hard to say what the Android tablet market will look like by then. Will the Motorola tablet's 1 or 1.3 Ghz CPU seem underpowered by then?
Also mentioned was Verizon's rollout of its LTE network. They say they're on track to have 75% of the country covered by 2012. If you haven't been keeping up with wireless terminology, LTE is a specification that in theory should allow up to 50 Mbps download speeds, but on Verizon's test networks it has hit 6-12 Mbps download. Still a lot faster than that 3G connection you're using now. (For more details, see Computerworld's LTE speeds faster than expected in Verizon trials for a report from last March.) For data card users, the new LTE service will cost about the same as what they now pay for 3G: $59.99/month.
There's even more info in the leak but I'll refer you to the Boy Genius Report article for all the details.
In related news, Android & Me quotes Motorola Co-CEO Dr. Sanjay K. Jha as saying his company will stop focusing on Motoblur. It isn't entirely clear whether he means they're still moving forward with Motoblur but just won't use it as a marketing opportunity, or if they're going to slowly phase it out. Let's hope for the latter; the beauty of Android is that you can customize it to be just the right phone for your needs. Having a company add their own UI layer to the base Android UI just complicates things.
I sure don't want Motoblur on the Droid Pro I'm planning to get, assuming there hasn't been a leak of the Droid 2X MegaPro Ultra by then!
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