12 Days of Techmas: Motorola Droid

From its freaky commercials to the overwhelmingly positive reviews, the Motorola Droid is the must-have gadget of the season. It’s not hard to see why. It has the looks and the specs to back it up. At 13.7mm, it’s wicked skinny, minimalist, and  sleek with its glass and metal construction. And even though that glowing red eye reminds me of a cross between H.A.L. from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Sauron from “Lord of the Rings”, it’s still oddly appealing.

The Droid is just awesome to look at, seriously. The 3.7-inch touchscreen has 854×480 resolutions and makes other phones look shabby in comparison. It’s also sporting a 5 megapixel camera that has DVD quality video capture and playback. There’s a full QWERTY keyboard and a 16GB memory that can be doubled with a microSD card.

Touted as “the best Android phone on the market”, the Droid is running Android 2.0 which means it is taking full advantage of that new 20,000 app milestone Android recently achieved. If you have any hacking skill you can port the latest version of the OS, 2.1 onto the device. It’s lightning fast and like the ad campaign says can do a lot of things that the iPhone can’t.

A Verizon-exclusive, the Motorola Droid is retailing for $199 with a two-year contract. Make a phone fanatic’s holiday with Time magazine’s “gadget of the year”.