Verizon Droid roundup: tethering, multi-touch and mobile metrics

It’s the first week after launch, so Droid is still in the honeymoon period. There are a fresh batch of stories every day - and today GoMo News has grabbed the three we found most interesting.

Hackers allow Droid tethering:

As we all found out after the CyanogenMod incident, Google has it’s work cut out for it when it comes to Android developers. There is a strong contingent who of Android coders who believe that every feature should be freely available to everyone who owns an Android - and so they are busily replicating the entire suite of Google Experience mobile applications.

And now Verizon has encountered them as well. “Tethering” is the process by which you use your phone to connect your computer to the internet. The iPhone is notorious for not allowing tethering. Verizon has no such problem on Droid - but it wants to charge up $30 a month to activate tethering.

“Nay, not so” said the programmers Over at Wired the discussed how every single previous incarnation of the Android OS has had a “jailbreak” released to allow free.

While the source code for Android 2.0 isn’t yet publicly available, it will be. And soon after, you can bet that free tethering software will be released for the Droid.

Multi-touch:

Despite the fact that Droid supports it, there is no out-of-the-box application that uses multi-touch on the screen. There have been questions as to whether this is because of patenting issues, and whether or not Droid will support it in the future. However, there is at least one app currently available on the Android Marketplace that supports multi-touch, and that is the Picsay photo editing app for Android. There’s a video of the app in use from www.guysfromqueens.com

Mobile metrics:

Free metrics service Clicky has been getting an awful lot of attention this week - it has been the go-to place to check how much of the mobile internet market Android is gobbling up in its first week. Clicky is very smartly maintaining a page dedicated to one thing alone - comparing the % of mobile web browsing that is being done on iPhone, Android, Droid and Everything else.

The results? Very good for Droid so far. This is now things stood (on the more than 150,000 sites that Clicky oversees) as of quarter to four today:

As Clicky itself is quick to point out, all this shows is how much people use these particular phones for browsing the web. But for over 3% of the share to go to Droid within one week of launch shows shows that people who are buying Droid are also surfing the web a lot.