Since the iPhone came out, many phones have come out surrounded by speculation that they could be the phone to put Apple’s iPhone out of business. Frankly, I don’t think any phone will do that for a long time, even if it’s better than the iPhone, but it’s certainly nice to see so many step up to the plate. The possibly under-hyped G1 from T-Mobile has secured a strong position in the race to be the perfect smart phone and created a loyal following for the Android platform. Palm joined in with the over-hyped Pre, which has plenty of its own merits, but hasn’t seemed to live up to all the marketing. Now we have yet another contender, that seems to have appeared from out of nowhere just recently.

Meet Droid
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and we all know how important design is in choosing a new phone. I got my hands on some high resolution photos from Verizon.

(Click any of the images for the high res versions)

PhoneScoop.com uploaded an unboxing video below. It’s just a glimpse, but it’s good to hear some opinions on how the phone feels to use. It makes a great point about the keyboard being so flat, but other than that, it looks great:

Better still, check out Gizmodo’s review for a video that shows how fast this thing is.

It’ll be feature rich
According to Verizon’s very nicely done marketing campaign, Droid Does. Verizon is pretty much saying that Droid does everything that the iPhone (and many others) do not. The commercials are centered around this and although the phone doesn’t have all the smooth curves the iPhone has, it already looks better than the G1, runs on the growing Android platform, and promises to deliver many of the missing some iPhone users have been asking about for the past couple years. Here’s some of the features it boasts that stand out to me:

- DVD quality video
- Speech recognition
- Augmented reality
- Multitasking
- Physical AND software keyboards
- 3.7 inch display (854×480 WVGA)
- 5MP camera with flash
- Intelligent dock
- Android 2.0 (open development, baby)
- Multitouch
- Replaceable battery
- Facebook integration
- It’s fast

I’m trying to get my hands on one for a real review, but so far it looks like it’s living up to the hype. What do you think from what you’ve seen so far? Is this your next phone? If it is, what phone will you be getting rid of for Droid?