The Motorola Droid is here.  And though I’m a little disappointed it didn’t actually arrive via Stealth Bomber, it did come in with a bang.  From all of the buzz online and an aggressive advertising campaign, Verizon Wireless has declared the Droid as the poster child of its new line of phones running Google’s Android OS.

Speaking of Android, remember the T-Mobile G1 from last fall?  There was a ton of anticipation around the release of the G1, which was essentially the poster child of the first generation of Android phones.  How does interest in the Droid compare to interest in the G1 around launch?
The chart below shows the daily traffic as an index to launch day traffic to the main microsite for both the G1 and the Droid.  The majority of traffic was referred to these microsites from ads and publicity surrounding each phone.  Traffic is shown in terms of days prior to launch, where L=0 corresponds to the launch date.

• The G1 saw roughly the same traffic spike both on announcement day and launch day (180K unique visitors on announcement day; 164K on launch day)
• The Droid saw a second spike in traffic 11 days after the initial announcement when Verizon Wireless announced the price of the phone
• Finally, the Droid saw a 40% increase in traffic on the day of launch compared to the announcement day (220K unique visitors at announcement; 367K at launch)

While the traffic to the two sites is comparable at each phone’s announcement (180K for G1, 220K for Droid), the Droid outshone the G1 in traffic levels to the site at launch (164K for G1, 367K for droid).  T-Mobile announced the G1 a full month before launch, but didn’t follow up with any major announcements about the G1 during those 30 days.  Verizon Wireless, however, announced the Droid 20 days prior to launch, but saved release of price details until just 9 days pre-launch.  The shorter duration of time between announcement and launch, coupled with a new announcement midway through the wait-period served to reinvigorate interest and keep the Droid in the minds of online consumers.

Clearly, between the two phones, the Droid comes out ahead in terms of overall interest around launch.  But the G1 did very well in terms of interest on T-Mobile’s site – and still continues to attract its fair share of interest a year later.  It will be interesting to see how the Droid fares in its life-span at Verizon Wireless.  Currently, we can say the Droid DOES.  But will the Droid continue to DO?

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