Well if you watched any television over the weekend — and let’s hope if you were that you weren’t watching the Cincinnati Bengals “game” — you probably saw Verizon Wireless’ iDon’t commercial. The folks that brought you “Can you hear me now?” made it clear: it’s going after Apple’s iPhone with its foray into Android phones. While there’s nothing official about this would-be, ice-cold iPhone killa beyond the slick iDon’t commercial — which has friends asking me what’s going on, because I’m that guy that everyone asks about this kinda stuff — this is the Internet age, so of course everyone already knows about Verizon’s forthcoming Droid phone. And no, neither one of those droids in the photo from Mos Eisley is the Droid I’m talking about.

Boy Genius has the low-down on the Motorola Droid, with more to come, according to the Boy. Check out all the comments on the Boy Genius photo gallery of this phone (specifically the image I have bogarted for your convenience below); it already has the fan boys — both the Apple and otherwise — in a tizzy; I expect some will be apoplectic before this phone even reaches the market. I used to write “fan boys and girls” because girls can be gadget geeks too, but most are probably not silly enough to argue on the Intertubes like the boys. And we all know what arguing on the Internet is like. No … wait … competitors in the Special Olympics probably have more going on intellectually than people that argue over the Internet.

Moving on: Here’s what Boy Genius has to say so far after its hands-on look at the Droid:

• It’s running Android 2.0. Duh.
• It’s thin. Just slightly thicker than an iPhone 3GS and the thinnest QWERTY-slider we’ve ever seen.
• It is the fastest Android device we’ve ever used. (It’s running a TI OMAP3430 processor)
• The feel of the device is very reminiscent of the OQO 02 model computer. Just smaller. It’s metal with a non-spring-assisted slide, very sturdy, and half soft-touch plastic.
• Awesome capacitive display. Plus it’s huge. Easily the best screen we’ve ever seen on an Android handset, and an amazing screen overall.
• The QWERTY keyboard is actually pretty usable and has a soft-touch rubberized finish. We’ve been told the keyboard design isn’t final on this unit, thus the two no-shows.
• Have we mentioned this phone flies? It’s the Android device to beat, and easily the most impressive. From what we’ve been told, Google had a direct hand in the Motorola Droid. Something to the point of almost dictating every move Motorola made when designing and making the phone. Interesting, huh?
• There’s a desktop cradle/charger that will ship with the Motorola Droid that we’ve been playing around with. It turns your Droid into a “multimedia station” and displays local weather, the time, etc.
• No one wants to listen, but it makes the CLIQ looks like a child’s toy (partly because it is, and partly because the Droid, even in its non-final form, is the most impressive phone we’ve used since the iPhone. It’s positively amazing).

And for those of you with better things to do than watch TV — you should have been out ‘caching anyway — here’s the aforementioned Verizon Wireless iDon’t commercial (I’m assuming I don’t have to explain the bon mot vis-à-vis the iPhone?)

And if you’ve been out ‘caching for the last month or so, I’ll recap: Verizon recently announced that it was jumping into the Android smartphone market (apparently it’s first Android handset isn’t going to be an HTC after all). Android, of course, is the mobile operating system championed by the Information Overlord Google. There’s no official word on when we will specifically see this reportedly whiz-bang phone, but as other clever kids on the Intertubes have noted, if you look at the code for Verizon’s Droid web page and peak at its XML file, the goofy alien-script counter stops on October 30 of this year, so ostensibly we’ll hear some sort of Droid-related announcement by the end of the month.

Will Verizon and Moto’s Droid succeed where the Palm Pre and others have failed — unseating the iPhone as the end-all and be-all of gadgetdom? Time will tell, but something tells me it could have the functionality of Hal 9000 (‘cept without the contradictory programming that causes him to murder people) and could be given away with a boat and a gift certificate to Waffle House and the iPhone fan boys would still debate the merits of a virtual keyboard — “they got it right this time, really! — vs. a physical slide-out keyboard. Such is the lure of the Dark Side; a true Jedi keeps an open mind.

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