Verizon Droid Bionic launches Sept. 8, $299

Verizon launched the Droid Bionic, another 4G LTE phone, on Wednesday, just a day before the handset will be available in stores. The Bionic, built by Motorola, complements 4G network support with a dual-core processor and a large, high-resolution touchscreen. Verizon will offer the Droid Bionic for a contract price of $299 starting on Sept. 8.

This high-end handset was shown off by Motorola back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s CEO, said it would launch in the second quarter of 2011. That didn’t happen, but Android enthusiasts on Verizon’s network may forgive the carrier based on the hardware features and functions in the Bionic:

1 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM
4.3-inch qHD (960×540) touchscreen with antireflective coating
32 GB of storage: 16 GB internal, 16 GB microSD card (included)
Google Android Gingerbread 2.3.4
8 megapixel auto-focus rear camera supporting 1080p video recording
Front-facing camera for video chat over 4G, 3G or Wi-Fi networks

Similar to the Motorola Atrix that debuted earlier this year on AT&T’s network, Verizon will offer a lapdoc solution for the Bionic. The $300 accessory is an 11.6-inch notebook shell that is powered by the smartphone when docked. A $99 dock option charges the phone and pipes video to a connected HDTV.

Stay tuned for a first-look video and full review of the Droid Bionic; we have a review unit in-house and will follow up with more details and impressions of Verizon’s newest LTE smartphone.

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Now playing on more Android devices: Netflix

Netflix has certified more Android devices for its mobile application today, adding support for a number of handsets and tablets powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor. This follows the May launch of Netflix for Android, which initially worked on just a handful of smartphones. Instead of rolling out its software for all Android phones, Netflix is testing the app on specific handset models and mobile processors to ensure secure and proper content playback.

Android owners can hit Google’s Android Market to see if their handset is now supported, but here’s the current list as of today:

Casio G’zOne Commando C771 with Android 2.2
HTC Droid Incredible, Droid Incredible 2, EVO, EVO 3D, G2, Thunderbolt
Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet
LG Revolution
Motorola Atrix, Droid, Droid X, Droid X2, Droid 2, Droid 3, Droid Charge
Samsung Epic 4G, Galaxy S, Galaxy S 4G, Fascinate, Nexus S, Nexus S 4G

One quick unofficial addition to the list: Lenovo introduced two new Android tablets today, the IdeaPad K1 and ThinkPad tablet. Although the Android Market only shows that one of the two tablets supports Netflix, Lenovo says that both do.

I understand Netflix’s requirement to test each device and I’m glad to see this isn’t taking too long to do, although there are hundreds of handsets to go yet. When it was announced in February that Netflix software would initially be supported on Qualcomm Snapdragon devices, I was concerned about chip fragmentation issues. Consumers don’t want to worry about which chip is powering their mobile device. Instead, they’re buying into a software platform with a smartphone or tablet, and they expect apps to run on the platform.

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Consumers losing patience with the slow mobile web

High consumer expectations for the mobile web aren’t yet being met, with 71 percent expecting sites to load on smartphones just as fast as they load on desktop computers. This adds a challenge for companies trying to build a mobile presence, as 43 percent of smartphone users won’t return to a site if it loads too slowly on the handset. Mobile websites are gaining functionality and therefore complexity, which can both tax the processing power of a smartphone while also loading slowly on 3G networks that looked speedy just a few years ago.

The data on consumer tolerances for mobile website performance comes today from a Compuware survey of 4,014 mobile web users around the world. The report, dubbed “What Users Want From Mobile,” paints an unexpectedly dreary picture for the mobile web, even as more people are switching from feature phones to capable smartphones. The survey illustrates that the longer the load time of a mobile site, the higher the rate of abandonment: Seventy-four percent of mobile phone users won’t wait more than 5 seconds for a page load. A few other noteworthy data points from the free report, which also mentions mobile apps in passing:

Almost half of those surveyed, 46 percent, said websites load more slowly on their phone than on the desktop.
Nearly 60 percent of web users say they expect a website to load on their mobile phone in 3 seconds or less.
An even 50 percent are only willing to wait 5 seconds or less for an application to load before exiting.
More than 80 percent of mobile web users would access websites more often from their phone if the experience was as fast and reliable.
Nearly half of mobile web users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone, and 57 percent are unlikely to recommend the site.

Of note is that survey participants must own a mobile phone and have used it at least once in the past year. That means owners of web-enabled feature phones could be skewing the results downward.

Fortunately, some help is on the way: This year is shaping up to be the coming-out party for dual-core chips and 4G networks. Most new high-end handsets arriving today are powered by processors with two computing cores clocked at 1 GHz or better, which provides a noticeable performance boost over last year’s smartphones: Web pages can render much faster with these chips. And although T-Mobile and Sprint led the 4G charge prior to this year — depending on your definition of 4G, that is — networks are now seeing upgrades that can provide download speeds of 12 Mbps or more on a mobile device.

It’s going to take time before most consumers have smartphones with multiple cores and 4G radios, however. And that means businesses trying to establish themselves on the mobile web need to manage what they control, which is the actual code for their mobile website. While you’d expect it to be fairly obvious that web developers should optimize their code for use on handsets, the data from Compuware’s survey puts a relatively detailed level of measurement as to why it really matters. Maturing smartphone hardware and mobile broadband networks will surely help, but businesses shouldn’t rely on them to solve all of their mobile web problems.

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