I know Verizon has to pay Lucasfilm to use the term “Droid” for their Android phones, back when iPhones were AT&T exclusives and they were using the slogan Droid Does, but I think Lucasfilm had also specifically trademarked/copyrighted/whatever the term. I remember projects like Trillian and Babelfish took their names from the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide properties but I don’t think they did any licensing.
Mostly I have this distinct memory of badly communicating with a Verizon employee when I got my first smart phone, an LG Ally.
I remember asking “Is this a Droid?” Meaning “is the make and model of this handset a Motorola Droid?” And the reply was “They’re all droids.” meaning they all run the Android operating system. I miss LG phones, or at least the state of my personal life back when I had LG phones.
I had a G4 that I liked pretty well, until after about 18 months it inevitably stopped working well, like all my early Android handsets. My Pixel 2 was my first phone to make it to 3 years (although Google did have to do a warranty replacement 20 months in) and it was still good but stopped getting security updates. The Pixel 2 being good ironically lead me to iPhones. I looked at my stepdaughter using a 6-year-old phone that still got updates, still could easily get parts for repairs locally, and started to wonder why I was spending hundreds of dollars buying a new phone every couple years.
I know Verizon has to pay Lucasfilm to use the term “Droid” for their Android phones, back when iPhones were AT&T exclusives and they were using the slogan Droid Does, but I think Lucasfilm had also specifically trademarked/copyrighted/whatever the term. I remember projects like Trillian and Babelfish took their names from the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide properties but I don’t think they did any licensing.
was it Verizon or Motorola?
IIRC it was Verizon; Motorola and eventually a couple other manufacturers would sell the same phones under different names in other countries.
Mostly I have this distinct memory of badly communicating with a Verizon employee when I got my first smart phone, an LG Ally.
I remember asking “Is this a Droid?” Meaning “is the make and model of this handset a Motorola Droid?” And the reply was “They’re all droids.” meaning they all run the Android operating system. I miss LG phones, or at least the state of my personal life back when I had LG phones.
I had a G4 that I liked pretty well, until after about 18 months it inevitably stopped working well, like all my early Android handsets. My Pixel 2 was my first phone to make it to 3 years (although Google did have to do a warranty replacement 20 months in) and it was still good but stopped getting security updates. The Pixel 2 being good ironically lead me to iPhones. I looked at my stepdaughter using a 6-year-old phone that still got updates, still could easily get parts for repairs locally, and started to wonder why I was spending hundreds of dollars buying a new phone every couple years.