The week has opened with a barrage of stories about the high sales figures for the Droid, Verizon’s Android device launched last week. According to reports, the company shifted 250,000 Droids during this first week, which is a strong figure by anyone’s standards. But can it keep that up long enough to be considered real competition to the iPhone?

More importantly, does it even need to? Let’s have a little look.

The Droid had a comparatively limited release:

The figure of 250,000 units isn’t gospel, but it’s a very decent estimate. According to the same stats from Flurry, it’s over 7 times less devices than iPhone sold during it’s opening week. Droid would need to maintain those opening week sales over an extended period before it comes close to the iPhone.

But Droid has only been released in one country. It remains to be seen how successful it is overseas (I for one would queue to buy one if they release it in Ireland).

Not only that, but it’s relatively late to market. iPhone will never lose the status it gained from being the first proper smartphone as we understand them today. When the iPhone launched there simply wasn’t anything else like it in anybodies pocket. And that is something Droid can never compete with.

The Droid is part of a bigger movement:

If you read reportage of the Droid, you’ll notice something interesting. In a lot of cases, the device isn’t being reported on by it’s own mertis, but rather as a representation of Android as a whole. Droid is now the poster boy for Android, and it’s sales are being regarded as a volley in the Android vs. iPhone war. The question is whether it matters if Droid sales plummet after week one, as long as it successfully pushes Android as a platform? I would say damn straight it does. Once the operator gets its cut, Apple pulls in 100% of the profit from iPhone – which gives it incredible financial leverage for marketing. The same can’t be said of Android. In the case of Droid the profits are going mostly to Motorola and Verizon. But if another Android device does well, those profits are going to drop. Which brings us to the next point…

The Droid has bigger fish to fry than the iPhone:

Some of the biggest competition Droid has to face is from other Android devices. The HTC Hero was the big Android on campus until Droid came along with it’s slick ad campaigns and blew everyone out of the water. And Droid will suffer the same fate. At least when an old iPhone model is made redundant, all the upgrades are still buying devices straight from Apple.

Another problem with this is application consistency. As a friend of mine said to me in an email today, “it’s still really hard to make a consistent user experience with apps on android, because you can’t guarantee any features.” Different Android devices will have different technical specifications and capabilities. So you’ll have developers that have to develop multiple versions of the same app for one operating system, and given the number of Androids we’re looking at over the next one to two years, that could be a lot. Or you’ll be looking at great apps that are only developed for one model of Android – which is the kind of thing that really annoys consumer.

What we think?

I think it’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Android. But I simply can’t claim I’m confident that it will ever really provide huge competition for iPhone. I foresee Android remaining a profitable force in the mobile marketplace for a long time… but one of the major problems for that market is fragmentation. The mobile industry is still running in a hundred different directions at once, and in many ways Android is going to be further fragmenting it’s own little corner of that market. The ability of Android to adapt to any niche, and release a device to fit any segment of the mobile buyer demographic is simultaneously a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage.