Let the Battle of the Social Media Phones begin: iphone, Android, Blackberry!

A new phone called Droid is about to hit the market at the end of October, and it will likely have the glitz and power to bury the iPhone.So I’m canceling my iPhone contract today. I’ll smugly wait out the rest of the month without the iPhone and rely on my second phone, the Blackberry Curve, which is a vastly inferior device to the coming Droid — but at least it can make calls more reliably and send email more efficiently than the iPhone.Don’t misread me. The iPhone won’t go away. It’s got way too much traction, especially with that generation of users — foremost the twenty somethings — for whom the iPhone was an introduction to the “smartphone.” For them, the iPhone was an awesome upgrade to the iPod. It was a phone that also let you carry iTunes. It has an awesome browser, and thousands of applications to play with. For this generation, the iPhone is pretty cool, even though it is hopelessly clunky for the rest of us wanting to use it for critical tasks. Oh, and then there are the gamers. Dean Takahashi, our gaming expert, tells me I’m crazy for dropping the iPhone, given all the cool games that have been developed for it.But for me, and millions of others, the Droid is still likely to be the answer if the reports about it are accurate (I haven’t seen the phone, but I’ve talked with someone who has worked directly with it). Droid is a play on the word “Android,” the name given by Google to its mobile phone operating system that it has licensed to manufacturers and carriers to use. Droid is going to be better than previous Android phones for several reasons. The earlier phones running on carrier T-Mobile, called G1, myTouch and most recently, the Cliq, lacked in three key areas: Hardware, user interface, and network power.All of these are improved with the Droid.First, the Droid (to be released on Oct. 30 if the secret code has been deciphered correctly) is an alliance with carrier Verizon and manufacturer Motorola. That’s significant because Verizon has the best phone n

The 30 second clip reels off a number of things that the iPhone can't do, and then abruptly goes into full-on tease mode by flashing glimpses of a robot-controlled future and a tagline that simply states: "Droid Does." No shots of the actual Motorola Droid (or Sholes, as it was known in the past) are shown, but a dedicated teaser portal has already been erected; through that, we're told that the phone will boast Android 2.0 and a 5 megapixel camera. At this point, we'd say the…