I guess the secret in smartphone business is patience. Patience is what makes a top-selling phone — the patience not to jump in until you’ve managed to couple great software with great hardware. In this article we will discover if the Droid has it all. Consider Apple, which made the insane figure of $1.67 billion last quarter. At a high level, to the uninformed, it would seem like Apple is nothing more than a design house that can order components. It rarely uses hardware that isn’t available to its competitors, yet Apple is able to post incredible earnings in a recession. Instead of relying on exclusive components to give it an advantage, Apple makes good hardware choices and couples it with solid design and software development.

Now the Motorola Droid smartphone shows us Motorola’s patience and great selection of hardware and software could pay off well, too. The new Droid phone is the first Android phone built with seemingly good hardware.

Every previous Android phone on the market had horrible hardware, let’s say not that good. What do you pair a slow hardware with? Slow graphics, of course, which again, has plagued every single Android phone on the market thus far.

To be fair, the first versions of the Android OS didn’t natively support anything but these slow platforms. But that’s also where Motorola’s been smart. It waited patiently for the new 2.0 release of Google’s Android platform, a platform that supports a nifty little chip from Texas Instruments. It’s the same chip that’s in the Palm Pre, and comparable to what’s in the iPhone 3GS. If the older Android phones used something akin to a modern day 486, the Droid uses a modern day Pentium. We’re not quite bleeding edge yet, but we’re getting there. It’s all good.

Smartphones are PCs, just slower and smaller. That’s not meant to be a controversial statement, it’s just the truth. A modern day PC is made up of a general purpose processor (that Intel processor that all those rockstars are talking about), a graphics processor (that GPU NVIDIA keeps saying is going to take over the world), a chipset to get the two to talk, some memory/storage and a basketful of other chips that enable things like USB, Bluetooth and WiFi. A modern day smartphone is made up of the same components, it’s just that Intel doesn’t make the CPU, NVIDIA doesn’t make the GPU, and many of these processors are integrated onto a single chip. So the hardware is simply not the best to say atleast.

Now, Motorola didn’t do anything special to make the new hardware work. Google and Texas Instruments did everything there. Motorola simply aligned its schedule with the Android 2.0 release and remained patient while its competitors sold slow Android phones. Motorola is the first, but definitely not the last.

I will say that my two biggest issues with the first generation of Android phones were the lack of multitouch gestures and poor performance. With phones like the Droid using (more) modern hardware, we’ll finally get to fixing the performance complaint. Better performance means a more attractive Android platform, which means better competition for Windows Mobile, iPhone OS and Web OS based smartphones. Which in the end keeps everyone fighting and innovation churning. Sweet. Cheaper phones for us customers. W00t!