It’s interesting that the Verizon (News - Alert) Droid came out about the same time as the Clearwire announcement of another $1.5 billion put into that company.

 

Android is rapidly becoming the OS of choice if you want to compete with Apple’s iPhone (News - Alert). We now have three carriers and six phones in the market from Android in the United States. T-Mobile has HTC G1, HTC, G2 and the Motorola CLIQ. Sprint has HTC’s Hero and the Samsung Moment. And now Verizon has the Droid (pictured below), which I talked about last week.

 

There is also the rumor of the Dell Droid going to AT&T (News - Alert).

 

With such success in getting into the carriers’ market mix, why do they need to invest in their own?

 

On the other hand, the future for Sprint is definitely entwined with Clearwire. As the Wall Street Journal reported layoffs at Sprint, Sprint also invested $1.2 billion went into Clearwire to raise their ownership to 56 percent.

 

The issue of building out a nationwide network is a top priority. While numbers have been disappointing in the adoption of Clearwire services in local markets, the relationships with other cable operator investors including Comcast, Time Warner (News - Alert) and Brighthouse, plus the contracting from T-Mobile and potential stimulus winners suggests that Clearwire will find users of their spectrum one way or another.

 

Clearwire also is not focused on the legacy voice network, but is looking to support M2M applications and solutions that match to using the bandwidth available.

 

At their events they highlight their support of people using their Slingbox, Skype (News - Alert) and other applications enabled by the Internet.

 

For many of us, the Internet has become the public network and it’s good to have a company that is focused primarily as Internet access.

 

It may be for that reason that Clearwire stock has faired pretty well in the stock market. While several reports have looked at the write-downs of investors as a story about the company itself, as opposed to the economy overall, the spectrum Clearwire owns is a valuable asset.

 

Many friends have pointed to the desire for a bulk price for all their devices, and it may be that Clearwire is in the unique position as a new entrant to not have legacy that would be hurt by such a model.

 

Regardless, I would expect that Clearwire’s growing pains will eventually give way to a viable competitor in the future.