Images are about all that's offered up here. No specs, no dates, no explanation. Just pics and some well-groomed fingernails:

We'll keep an eye out for more. [BGR]

Promising 10 more Androids for the coming months, Motorola's La Jolla sounds like a cheap PAYG at most. Unearthed in source code of the Cliq, the existence of the Motus, Morrison and Zeppelin were confirmed, along with a new one to us—La Jolla. Specs appear to include a Qualcomm 7201A proessor, MAX7359 keyboard and Kionix accelerometer.

Thanks to the newly-released Android 2.0.1 SDK, manufacturers are now able to use differently-sized screens, like the 240 x 400 resolution WQVGA the La Jolla supposedly has. While it won't break any records or wow with its beauty, the La Jolla will help attract the lower-end of the market to Android, thus making it more popular. [AndroidAndMe via PhoneArena]

The phone (or tablet, as it's sometimes called for some reason), similar to the Droid but lacking a keyboard, is said to have a 3.7-inch screen, FM radio, and HDMI port (though we can't see that in any of the pictures), running Android 2.1. Android 2.1, by the way, doesn't look different from Android 2.0 in the pictures, though apparently it's faster and more stable. It's also clearly shown here as having a 5MP camera, like the Droid, and not the rumored 8MP camera.

It's also now clear that it's got some sort of unfortunate medical condition on its lower right side that results in a weird, asymmetrical but not ergonomic lump. What's it for? A radio antenna for OTA TV? The HDMI port? Who knows, but I hope it sees a doctor before coming Stateside, if it's headed our way. [Androidin via Engadget]

Boy Genius Report hears that the deal will last only three days, from December 4th (tomorrow!) to the 7th. There's one caveat: The deal doesn't allow for a free Droid. If you buy either a Droid or a Droid Eris, you can get a Droid Eris for free (after rebate). A little lame, but if you split the cost with somebody else, it's still a pretty solid deal for two of the top Android phones on the market. You'll just have to figure out who gets the Terminator Phone and who gets the prettier Last Year's Model.

The deal also includes the enV Touch and enV 3, if you're into that kind of thing. Still unconfirmed, but we've got no reason to doubt it. [Boy Genius Report]

It's believed the Sholes will be part of the Droid line, and while the two devices look fairly similar, the Sholes "tablet," as it's being referred to despite its 3.7-inch touchscreen, apparently has a HDMI port. You know, for hooking up to your TV to watch films shot with the 8-megapixel camera. There's also a Xenon flash, and internally it's running on the same 550MHz OMAP TI 3430 processor as the Droid.

This is the keyboard-less Droid you were looking for. [Mobile Android China via BGR]

AT&T's 3G Network Sees 2,000% Increase Since iPhone 3G Release

In the wake of a big $65 million upgrade to its network here in the San Francisco Bay Area, AT&T revealed that the improvement was due to 3G usage being up 2,000% after the release of the iPhone 3G last year. That sounds like a crazy number for which the iPhone deserves all kinds of high fives, but it's really not surprising—how many AT&T 3G phones were there before the iPhone 3G, even? And of course 3G use across the board is up in crazy numbers, since smartphones have really started taking off in the last year or so—so to be honest, the number doesn't really mean all that much. Hence its ending up here in the sad pit of Remainders. [All Things D]

Droid Camera Fixed, Without Explanation?

The Motorola Droid camera is a serious problem. I can't compete with Matt's angry poetry on the subject, so here it is, clipped from his review:

The camera is complete garbage. It takes 10 years to start up, 2 to focus, and another 4 to actually take the goddamn picture. And there's no distinct visual feedback to let you know a photo's been snapped. And the photos suck. That pumpkin shot, in decent lighting, is as good as it gets. Like I said in the Android 2.0 review, I don't know if it's the hardware or the software, but it's inexcusably bad.

Yow. But users have spontaneously been reporting that the camera, all of a sudden, has stopped sucking—what's the deal? Apparently there was some kind of bug wherein a particular state of the clock (meaning, time of day) screws with the Droid's autofocusing, which sounds insane to me, but what do I know? Apparently it should work okay now, and while it's temporary, the incoming Dec. 11th bug fix should take care of things. [Electronista]

Genius Bar App Won't Help if Your iPhone Is Broken

Rumor has it that Apple is planning to add a Genius Bar app to the App Store (appappappapp) that will let you make appointments, track your place in line, and curse the world when you realize you can't use the app because your iPhone is broken, which is the whole reason you need to make the appointment in the first place. Catch 22 apps are the very best kind of apps. [TUAW]

Samsung Beats out Vizio for Top LCD Seller

I bet you've been waiting by your computer, eager to see who managed to eke out the top spot in the LCD sales wars this fiscal quarter. Will it be Vizio, the low-priced upstart who took the LCD world by storm? Or Samsung, the crafty veteran with the quality sets and sleek design? Looks like this quarter, Samsung took the prize—and it's in Remainders because honestly who cares, at all. [CrunchGear]

Luckily, the bug appears to be software related. Time for a patch.

Who amongst the swelling Droid ranks has experienced this annoying issue? [Droid Support Forums via Engadget]

It's the best phone on Verizon, and with Android 2.0, the second best smartphone you can buy, period. It's flawed, deeply in some ways. But it's the second best phone around, on the best network around.

Droid is a champion of possibilities: for Motorola, for Verizon, for Android 2.0. It exists to show you what each of them can really do. You can kind of think of it like a Super G1, laying out what it means to be an Android 2.0 phone, with powerful new processors and delicious new displays with sky-high resolutions. If Droid is merely the first in a new wave, we have a lot to be excited about.

The Shiny New OS

The main attraction for Droid is Android 2.0, the remarkably updated mobile OS from Google. It's so important, it gets its own review. After all, you will start to see it on other phones soon. It's what makes Droid so great—new navigation app, new contacts/social network syncing, better email management, better browser—but also why Droid still falls short of the iPhone, particularly when it comes to managing music and video. If there's something you don't see here, chances are we discussed it in the earlier piece—if you care about the phone, you're gonna want to read the full software review too.

Design and Build

It didn't hit me until last weekend why Droid's design struck such an emotional chord with me. Was it the functionalist, industrial masculinity, expressed perfectly through glass and metal and unapologetic angles, in a powerful phone that's remarkably streamlined? It's all of that, yes. But it's also the fact that aesthetic is rendered black and gold metal accents, which is why it taps into something deep and profoundly affective from my childhood:
It's practically cheating. I can't not love the design of this phone.

Oh, That Screen

Droid's 3.7-inch, 854x480 display with an eye-popping pixel density of 267ppi, is the kind of screen you ache for. An analogy: Do you remember how amazing you thought Nintendo 64 games looked, ten years ago? Have you looked at them lately? Do you remember the sinking feeling you got, realizing just how ugly they are now? That's how'll you'll feel looking at every other phone with the now-standard 480x320 screens we thought were so gorgeous a couple of years ago. They're lo-fi and lifeless by comparison.

It's the clarity of the text that captivates. It's true, there've been Windows phones with excellent screens that have the same resolution as Droid, but the font rendering has always been too weak to take advantage of them. Reading ebooks on an iPhone has always given me a headache (so I don't), but with Droid's pixel density, I could read on it for hours. It's that good. The color's fantastic, too, though not Zune HD OLED level.

Touch response is mostly effective. When there are misfires, like getting no response when you flick your finger to pull out the app menu, it's hard to tell if it's the phone or the software—at least until more Android 2.0 phones are out there. But no serious complaints.

Keyboard and Strange Buttons

The keyboard is okay. I liked it a lot more on Day 1 than I do today, and that's because I never got any faster. The problem is that the key landscape is too flat and homogenous—a necessary sacrifice for Droid's remarkable skinniness—so there's simply no way to feel out precisely what key your thumb's on, meaning I never broke out of having to stare at the keyboard while typing. I found the actual layout to be excellent. Overall, the keyboard works, but you'll probably never fly on it. I'm faster on the landscape touch keyboard, personally.

The d-pad's not as dandy as a trackball for getting around, but for navigating around text, it's better than I expected—despite its puniness, I never pressed the wrong button.

But I hate the four soft touch buttons on the front of the phone. For one, there are no dedicated phone or end call buttons, so if you accidentally call somebody at 4am, you have to figure out how to end the call exclusively via the software interface. For two, the lack of feedback is annoying, especially if you're holding down the search button trying to activate voice search and it's not coming up. Did you miss the button? Are you pressing it wrong? Who knows? If Android's going to rely hard on these four buttons, the way iPhone relies on the home button, they need to be actual physical objects.

This Camera Sucks

The camera is complete garbage. It takes 10 years to start up, 2 to focus, and another 4 to actually take the goddamn picture. And there's no distinct visual feedback to let you know a photo's been snapped. And the photos suck. That pumpkin shot, in decent lighting, is as good as it gets. Like I said in the Android 2.0 review, I don't know if it's the hardware or the software, but it's inexcusably bad. (Update: Here's a couple of more shots from the camera. You can compare the indoors one with the much better Sprint Hero sample shot seen here, since they were taken in the same place.)

Video's not terrible, though, beyond the fussy format even VLC doesn't even like playing:

Performance

Droid's brain is a potent ARM Cortex A8 TI OMAP 3430—it's basically the same as the chips inside of the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS. Like I said in the Android 2.0 review, while it runs apps and multitasks with gusto, basic things like menus and the desktop stutter way too often. It's like driving a Ferrari with a door that groans loudly every time you open it.

Battery Life

With moderate to heavy usage—browsing, some navigation, push Gmail, moderate app usage, with the occasional app running in the background—I managed to make it through a full 8-12 hour day before recharging, each day for about a week, though some days were closer than others. Your mileage will vary, depending on how many apps you've got running in the background and how much you hit GPS, but my experience was that it was entirely acceptable for a modern smartphone.

Nuts, Bolts and Stability

Verizon's network is top notch, and being able to actually use the internet on my phone with impunity in New York is revelatory. In both New York and Seattle testing, reception has been excellent, though around Pittsburgh, it was spottier than expected. Voice quality was pretty excellent whenever we didn't use Google Voice.

While definitely stable enough to use as an everyday phone, we did run into a few bugs: GPS accuracy was wildly off-target on more than one occasion, pinpointing our location hundreds of miles away, and the only way to fix it was to reboot the phone (I assume that's a software issue, not a hardware one). We also had one complete crash after finishing a phone call that required a reboot. And more apps stopped responding more often than we were used to on previous versions of Android, requiring a force close.

Hello, Moto

These things are true about Droid: The camera's not great; the keyboard isn't mindblowing; Android 2.0 lacks the polish and multimedia prowess to completely match the iPhone. What's also true is that a killer design, Google's services, Android's exploding app ecosytem, powerful multitasking, a stunning screen and Verizon's network still make it the second best phone you can buy right now, after the iPhone.

At the same time, there's reason to pause. Android is evolving more rapidly than any other smartphone platform, both in terms of the hardware and software. When HTC's Hero came out, it crushed every other Android phone out there. Just a couple short months later, Droid is on top. In four months, we'll probably see a new champion. That Droid sets such a high bar for everything after might be the best thing about it.

Display, display, display

Um, just look at it

A smartphone you actually want on Verizon!

Keyboard is merely adequate, at best

Camera is utter garbage

[Droid]

The Motorola CLIQ, a new Android smartphone from Motorola with a bevy of social networking features, is now shipping. The phone is the first to employ Motoblur, a software integrating various social networking and communication functions for ease of use. We reviewed the CLIQ a few weeks ago and thought it had much promise, despite some issues with a sluggish processor. The phone is available through T-Mobile for $199.99 after discount. [T-Mobile]

Also available today is the SkyDock from XM, the first device to let drivers control satellite radio with their iPhone or iPod Touch. Though it didn't knock our socks off when we tried it, the SkyDock does deliver on its promise and is currently the only way to tap into XM radio in the car via the iPhone. Available from the Apple Store, Best Buy, Radio Shack and other retailers for $120, the SkyDock is powered by the car's DC plug and allows listeners to tag songs on XM for later purchase through the iTunes music store. But of course. [XM]

The new name is not as tech-heavy of geektastic as Droid, but we can see the point. From here on out, things are going to be different (hopes Verizon/Motorola).

The image comes from the O2 web site, where the Droid is masquerading about as the Milestone for a presumably contract-free price of about $595. Launch day is November 9, a mere three days after we Yanks get the coveted handset here in the States. No word on whether or not O2 scored an exclusive here or what, as there's no mention of the phone popping up on other carriers' web sites. [Slashgear]

Head of Android development Andy Rubin states the obvious by saying it would be foolish for Google to "compete with its customers" who license the OS. In his own words, "We're not making hardware. We're enabling other people to build hardware."

This is how licensing OSes has generally worked, with the PC and Windows Mobile. (But not with the Mac during the clone wars, which eventually ended in cancellation.)

As CNET points out, Google sometimes plays a part in designing phones. Apparently the hinge mechanism in the G1 was added at Google's request. But that's a long way from designing a whole phone.

Phones like the Droid were also rumored to have been developed with Google helping along the way. As long as the trend keeps up, I'm sure Google will be perfectly happy to let Motorola, HTC and others spread their OS like the sneaky little world-dominating thing it is. [CNET via Electronista]

Plus, you can pre-order it today. I'd wait for the reviews in about a week though, personally. [BusinessWire via Engadget]

The video is from Vietnamese site, Tinhte.com, (no freaky extra finger this time), so is likely an engineering sample. That'd also explain the sluggish response it seems to have. [YouTube via SlashGear]

Right after taking the cursed reins of Motorola, then-incoming CEO Sanjay Jha had a short town hall meeting and was accosted by a Moto engineer working on Android, Rick Osterloh, as he came off the stage. "By the end of that week, Mr. Osterloh was sitting on the corporate jet, flying with Mr. Jha back to California" to talk up Android, according to the NY Times' account.

Jha lopped off Moto's entire Symbian division in weeks, and when Windows Mobile hit delays, punted it entirely. Most impressively, I think, when it came time to pick out the brains of their new phones, Jha rejected a chip that his division had made when he was at Qualcomm, prior to Motorola, in favor of the TI OMAP chip that's in the Droid.

Funny thing about the Droid, while its aesthetic is dominated by a strict functionalism, it was actually even harder-edged before—Verizon asked Motorola to make it rounder and add the softer touch back so it didn't appeal solely to dudes. (Um, good job with that?) I'm just happy for Motorola that they weren't crushed into oblivion by the weight of their own ineptitude and might actually mount a real comeback. There's more to the story over at the Times: [NYT]