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Droid Round-Up: Opening Sales And Firmware Update

Though neither Motorola nor Verizon Wireless has provided any official numbers, it appears as though about 100,000 Droids may have sold the first weekend the new Android phone was available. Also, based on internal documents, Verizon is already planning a major system update for both the Droid and HTC Eris Android phones.

Droid Sales

Well, the Droid sure didn't sell one million units, or we'd have heard from Motorola and Verizon Wireless by now.

Mark McKechnie at Broadpoint AmTech Inc. estimated that Verizon Wireless had about 200,000 Droids in stock at its stores across the country for the Droid launch on Friday, November 6. By his count, Verizon sold through about half of its stock of Droid devices -- or about 100,000 of them.

McKechnie said, "I see the first few days as encouraging. There seems to be pretty good demand -- they’ve taken the right steps and picked a good partner with Google on the Android side." McKechnie believes Motorola and Verizon Wireless will sell up to one million Droids by the end of the year.

Motorola and Verizon Wireless are mum about sales figures at the moment.

Android System Update

According to internal Verizon Wireless documents spied by Phandroid, a major over-the-air update is headed to both the Motorola Droid and HTC Eris on December 11. The list of bug fixes, changes and additional features is beyond extensive.

For the Droid, it looks like nearly every system will see some sort of fix. This includes accessory compatibility, GPS / Google Maps goof-ups, visual voicemail, Yahoo email support, Exchange ActiveSync fixes, messaging bugs, Bluetooth blunders and even calling features. There's a lot more. In other words, if you're an early adopter of the Motorola Droid, some of the bugs you may have encountered in the first few days of use are being worked out.

(Nice of Verizon Wireless to release a buggy phone. Can anyone say BlackBerry Storm?)

The HTC Eris sees a similar bunch of updates. Check out the update log in this document here.

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