We all knew it was coming eventually.  Last year Verizon and Motorola saw great success with the release of the original Droid, which was the  flagship Android phone for at least a few weeks.  The Droid continues to be a great success, being that it is a great phone with a lot of advertising behind it.  Makes sense that there would be a follow up apart from the Droid Incredible and Droid X.

Today Verizon has finally made the Droid 2, the true successor to the Droid, official.  The Droid 2 looks fairly similar to the first Droid, but the corners are rounded where the Droid had sharp angles.  Gone is the bar under the screen that stayed put when the screen slides up, now it slides with the rest of the front.  Also gone is the D-pad, replaced with arrow keys and an “OK” button, which make the keyboard feel more natural to some.

For specs, the Droid 2 ships with Android 2.2 installed, so no worrying about updates.  The mobile hotspot functionality on Froyo will cost an extra $20 a month.  With the Droid 2 we also have a 5 MP camera, 8 GB of flash storage (with and 8 GB microSD card included for 16 GB of storage), and DLNA streaming.

The phone will be available for pre-order on Wednesday, and will be available in Verizon stores on Thursday for $199 on a two-year contract.  To be nice to current subscribers, Verizon is taking a play from AT&T’s book and allowing anyone who has a Verizon contract ending this year to upgrade to the Droid 2, or any other smartphone, without penalty.  You may want to wait, however, because the R2-D2 version of the Droid 2 will be available online starting in September. {Engadget}

The new updates brings Flash 10.1 to the Google phone, along with a host of other features.  There’s a slightly redesigned home screen, where users will always have access to the call function and the web browser no matter what home screen they are looking at.  The Nexus One will now also feature tethering both via Bluetooth and mobile hotspot where users can connect up to 8 other devices to the phones 3G connection through WiFi.  Other improvements include automatic updates for apps if you so choose, an “update all button” in the Market, and faster speeds for applications.

Phones other than the Nexus One will get the update, but it will take time for the phone manufacturers and carriers to push out the updates.  For the Nexus One, Google handles pushing out updates on their own.  For phones like the myTouch 3G, the update could be relatively simple as it runs on stock Android without any added bells and whistles.  Phones like the EVO 4G and HTC Incredible, however, will likely take longer as they use a custom skin over Android which will have to be made compatible with the new OS version.

It also calls into question the new phones we’ve been seeing like the Galaxy S smartphones from Samsung like the Captivate, Vibrant and Epic 4G and the new Droid X, which were announced as running on Android 2.1.  Of course, this was before we knew that Google would start pushing the updates through.  It would make sense for the companies like Motorola, Samsung and HTC to attempt to put Froyo on their phones before they’re launched, but there’s no guarantee that the updates will be ready in time.  Looks like we’ll be seeing a lot of Over The Air updates of Froyo rolling out over the next few months.  Meanwhile, Google is likely hard at work on the version, Gingerbread.