The Droid 2 and X have already been pegged for March 2011 EOL (end-of-life) status.

Here in MI, you can't find a Droid X. Everywhere is sold out.

If this report is true, that's the frustrating thing about Android: you get a scarce phone one month, and a few months later it's completely phased out.  Pace of innovation, or another symptom of Android fragmentation?  How much longer can carriers keep you locked into a two-year contract when the landscape is advancing so quickly?

Makes used phones, sans contract, much more appealing.

This morning, I went to the Novi Apple Store and spoke to a technician, bypassing AT&T completely (from whom I ordered the phone on launch day).  I explained my problems, how I more or less hated the iPhone 4 and its unreliability made the phone unusable for anything other than novelty.

Karl, my tech, seemed to understand my story completely.  He ran a few diagnostics on my iPhone 4, saw my problem, and quickly offered to swap out my phone for another.  I agreed.  Truthfully, it was the only solution I was willing to accept, as I have tried a ton of other quasi-solutions that are posted all over the web.

Curiously, the phone he gave me was something he called an 'engineering' phone, one he claims has been tested very thoroughly to ensure it's a error-free device.  It came out of a hard-shelled black plastic/composite box, and Karl said each of them ship in two other padded boxes to ensure safe travels.  In his words, it's a 'known-quantity' unit.  If I have problems with this, they'll likely be a result of the AT&T network, software or a drop on the other end of the call, but ostensibly not because of this particular iPhone 4 unit.  These phones, he told me, more or less eliminate hardware issues from a diagnostic equation.  At the very least, they represent a clean hardware slate.

(The new phone also is likely a product of a later manufacturing build; i.e. it's not a day-one launch unit.  Could Apple have been tweaked in manufacturing since pre-launch?  Possible, but who knows?)

I've no idea yet if this phone will wind up being an improvement, but I'll say this: Apple has always taken care of me as a customer.  Would Motorola do the same thing?  Could they?  One might argue that a Motorola Droid X wouldn't be dropping the calls like an iPhone, so support wouldn't be necessary.  Perhaps.  But that's missing the point.  When I've needed support from Apple, I've gotten it.  Every time.

So, we'll see how this goes.  If the problem persists, I'm afraid it'll be time to move away from the iPhone and AT&T.

On any given day, I drop 2-4 calls on my iPhone 4 with AT&T service.  Today, on the way into the office, I dropped 5.  The phone was resting in my car's center console, so I can't even blame the Death Grip/Antennagate fiasco.

I can just say there's something inherently wrong with the iPhone 4 -- at least the very early production units I and a few friends received on launch day.

My mobile phone is my only phone.  It needs to work.  And I have reached my breaking point.  The iPhone 4 is the worst 'phone' I've ever used, and AT&T won't do a thing about it.  'Get a case,' they say, completely ignoring the fact that I don't touch my handset when I'm in the car.  (I use Bluetooth.)  Regardless, they'll do nothing -- not even a clean exchange of my iPhone 4 for another.  Apple just tells me to deal with AT&T, because I ordered it through them.

This past weekend, I spent some quality time at a Verizon dealer with the Droid X.  What shocked me was my immediate impression: for the first time ever, Android has become a true competitor to the iPhone.  This is a watershed moment: all previous Android versions were clunky and slow and felt built with baling wire and duct tape.  Android 2.1, running on the Droid X, was nice.  Very nice.  Not as polished as iOS, and the hardware wasn't up to Jobs/Ive snuff, but it was quite nice unto itself.  Put another way: it wasn't shit as some would have you believe.  And Android 2.2 (Froyo), announced at the 2010 Google I/O, is right around the corner.

I'm very seriously thinking of moving off AT&T/iPhone to Verizon/Droid X.  I'm an ardent Google user anyway -- cue up the lock-in drums and Skynet fears -- and the integration with Gmail, Google Calendar, Gtalk, Maps and other Google-based services is compelling.

I'm looking for real-world stories of those who have made a similar move.  Are you happy with the Android OS?  Do you have a Droid X specifically?

Any and all comments welcome.  Do share.

VentureBeat:

The app in question came from Jackeey Wallpaper, and it was uploaded to the Android Market, where users can download it and use it to decorate their phones that run the Google Android operating system. It includes branded wallpapers from My Little Pony and Star Wars, to name just a couple.

It collects your browsing history, text messages, your phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and even your voicemail password. It sends the data to a web site, www.imnet.us. That site is evidently owned by someone in Shenzhen, China. The app has been downloaded anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times.

Interesting parallel piece of data: 47% of Android apps access some variety of third-party data, while only 23% of iOS apps do.  I'd see this as correlational, not causal.

Nonetheless, looks like Apple is doing a better job policing its app store, but it's not fair to indict the Android Marketplace for this when 'wallpaper' apps are barely apps at all.

If anything, this is a harbinger of the app explosion mobile platforms are seeing and a call for attention to the security problems that will be in tow.

My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: “Daddy’s book.” She was holding my Kindle electronic reader.

Here is a child only beginning to talk, revealing that the seeds of the next generation gap have already been planted. She has identified the Kindle as a substitute for words printed on physical pages. I own the device and am still not completely sold on the idea.

My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

Fascinating article from Brad Stone stating that, quite simply, the unflagging rate of tech advancement is creating mini generation gaps whereby these mini-generations can be identified and grouped by what technology they grow up with during formative years.  Makes perfect sense, because more than once I've observed that young kids today are familiar with an iPhone in a way that kids of eight years ago are not.  My son, now 5, tries to touch, swipe and pinch the screen of every mobile phone he comes across.  Eight years ago, kids would have been introduced to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone or something from Nokia and then introduced to an iPhone.

Another thing I think about: what will tech look like when my son is 16?  How many disruptive technologies will come down and displace the things that, by today's standards, are considered contemporary?

And perhaps the biggest question of all: speaking from psychological, cognitive, sociological and developmental perspectives, what long-term effect will all this technology, replete with its 'information anywhere' capability, have on people?  Today, we see all sorts of psychopharmaceutical drugs aimed at what we now consider mainstream psychological conditions: anxiety, ADHD, depression.  It's interesting -- and not just a little scary -- to consider what we'll be 'treating' 15 years from now as a result of people being overstimulated, forced to multitask beyond what the human mind can reasonably do (some argue we're there already) and rely on technology for everything: information, answers, directions, social consensus, morality.

Even as a tech geek, I reel sometimes.  As a guy who used to read a book a week but now struggles to get through one a month (most of my reading is web reading, which, arguably, is more convenient due to its more fragmented nature), I wonder where this is all going.

I know -- I think I'll check out a Kindle.  If, of course, the Apple tablet disappoints.  Then -- yes, then -- I'll get back to reading at a tyrannosaurid rate.  Right?

Tim O'Reilly, reporting just after the Nexus One press event:

News from the front: a possible turning point for Android. I've been a huge iPhone fan, but after using the Nexus One for a few weeks, I find so much to like that I'm close to the point where Android might be my first choice. While I may yet go back to my iPhone, I'm conflicted.

As an iPhone user who was impressed with the Motorola Droid but not enough to consider ditching my iPhone for it, the Nexus One already has me thinking that Apple better bring its biggest guns to the 2010 mobile web fight. While Twitter is ablaze about how the Nexus One is the iPhone killer, I think that's premature: anyone who's been doing this a while knows that Apple has had good G2 on this for a while now, and the next version of the iPhone (slated for the now-traditional June/July release) isn't going to concede much to today's Nexus One.

Should be interesting, but all speculation aside, it's time to remember this: when smart companies compete, customers always win. It's a beautiful thing.

(Via @khurtwilliams)

Robert Scoble:

The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare.

With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.

But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have.

No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I see the same thing.  I do very little SEO/SEM work on my employer's blog or main website, but our search performance has skyrocketed over the past year.

Why?

As near as I can tell, consistent content creation.  As a company that believes in engaging its community and customers, we try to post something to that blog every weekday, and we’ve done a pretty good job of it all year.  No author of that blog writes for keyword karma: we simply post content that we think will be useful or interesting to our customers, prospects and industry colleagues.  The rest just happens, and I attribute that to consistency.

Of course, our company has aircover from its Twitter and Facebook activity too, and as the new real-time web emerges, new content developed through these channels will factor into search performance.  Early this year, I was telling people how consistent, quality tweeting was important to draw new followers through Twitter’s official search engine.  Now, as 2010 approaches and social content is being integrated into Google and Bing search results, the importance simply cannot be overstated.

The ground is shifting away from static SEO keyword saturation and more towards behavior-driven merit systems.  Google and Bing are getting smarter at weeding out SEO farming sites (save a few examples, like appliance searches), and during 2010 I think we’ll see the semantic web in the sense that search engines will understand intent much better than they do now.  That’s not to say the system won’t be gamed anymore, but increasingly new content, interaction and effort will be rewarded rather than metadata and keyword concentrations on business websites.

So.  All that said, what’s the real value of intelligent, consistent social media activity for business?  If it wasn’t massive before, it is now.

(crosspost)