Hasta La Gadget!

Motorola tonight released the full specifications and a photo gallery of the highly-awaited Droid phone on their public Web site, pre-empting the anticipated October 28 announcement of Verizon Wireless’s first Android smartphone.

According to the Motorola site, which was first noticed by the Boy Genius Report blog but then independently confirmed and loaded by PCMag, the Droid is a large touchscreen phone with a sliding keyboard. It’s 2.4 x 4.6 x .5 inches in size and weighs six ounces. That’s relatively heavy, but slim. Its color will be “licorice w/brown sugar accents.”

The phone has an unusually high-resolution, 3.7″ 480×854 touch screen; the iPhone’s touch screen is only 320×480 resolution.

The Droid’s OS is Android 2.0, as Verizon previously showed on their teaser Web site for the device. It is the first Android 2.0 phone.

The Droid has a 550 Mhz processor, according to the site, which didn’t describe the processor architecture. The architecture is important because most Android phones up until now have run on 528 Mhz ARM11 processors, which some users consider sluggish in some circumstances. The recently announced Samsung Moment upped the ante to an 800 Mhz ARM11. If the Droid runs a newer form of architecture, known as Cortex-A8, it could be faster with a lower clock speed.

More details and photos after the jump.

Looks like we don’t need to bother deciphering coded countdown clocks any more. Last night Verizon Wireless sent out a bunch of invitations to a press event on October 28 for “2009’s most highly anticipated phone.” Engadget, InformationWeek and Gizmodo got invites, and we did too.

A box arrived for me from Verizon’s PR firm today, with a wonderfully scary little robot-eye sticker on the side. Given that the Motorola Droid launch is coming on October 28, could this be the new phone? Head to the jump to see what happened when I unboxed the contents.

Yawn. So, who else is bored of all of this Droid talk? Sure the phone isn’t out yet (or, really, even officially announced), but who isn’t ready to start planning for a second Motorola/Verizon Android handset? Apparently there’s one in the works already–actually, if the pictures leaked to Boy Genius Report are to be believed, the thing looks to be well on its way.

The phone–apparently codenamed: Calgary–seems to be the carrier’s answer to the T-Mobile Cliq. The device apparently runs Motorola’s Android Blur software, which would mean that it’s heavily focused on the social networking aspect of things, thus targeted largely toward the teenage Sidekick crowd, who, are likely not all that happy with T-Mobile/Danger at the moment.

The device has a QWERTY slider keyboard, Wi-Fi, and a 3MP camera.

Sidekick users who have been angry at T-Mobile and Microsoft’s Danger for losing their personal data have received a little solace: Microsoft is now offering a recovery tool on T-Mobile’s Web site to help owners of the mobile device retrieve their lost contacts. This tool will restore contacts only, but Microsoft said in a statement that it is working on retrieving photos, notes, and other data as well.

The Sidekick data-loss saga started the first weekend of this month, when Danger had a massive server outage, and Sidekick users–whose data was in the cloud–lost all of their personal information. T-Mobile USA and Microsoft have slowly become more optimistic about data recovery since thenh, but the PR damage is already done.

Afflicted users can launch the contacts recovery tool by visiting the My T-Mobile Web site.