It is, by the way, fascinating how many sites reported the merger as a done deal the moment it was announced in August. Nope. Months later, it remains a proposed deal, and the chances that t won’t go through, while not huge, are more than zero.

When I wrote about the new Droid RAZR this morning I hadn’t seen one in person. A few hours later, I visited with representatives of Motorola and Verizon and got a demo and a bit of hands-on time.

A few additional observations:

It looks nicer in person. In the stock photo I ran earlier, it looks pretty much like every other big-screen Android smartphone. In the, um, flesh, the phone is all Gorilla Glass and chamfered edges and Kevlar back, and the fact it’s 7.1mm thin makes it feel like less of a beast than some 4.3″ Android phones. It’s the classiest Droid I’ve seen to date. (There is a little hump at the top, where the camera and ports are, but you won’t feel it when you hold it.)

The battery is built in. I shoulda been able to figure out that a phone that’s meaningfully thinner than the iPhone must seal the battery into the case to conserve space. The rest of the industry has been slow to follow Apple’s lead when it comes to dumping removable batteries; I wonder if the RAZR is a sign of things to come?

Smart Actions are neat. As I said in my first post, battery life is always a concern with LTE phones. (Actually, it’s a concern with phones, period, of course.) The RAZR addresses the challenge in part by packing a huge honkin’ battery, but it also offers a feature called Smart Actions which can automatically tweak settings to eke as much out of a charge. For instance, it can shut off LTE and GPS when you get home, since you probably have Wi-Fi there and know where you are. Some options are preprogrammed and you can create your own ones, including ones that don”t involve power conservation, such as switching wallpapers when an action is triggered.

Motorola is doubling down on LapDocks. The turn-your-phone-into-a-notebook peripheral that debuted back in February with Motorola’s Atrix still has some rough edges, and hasn’t yet changed the world. (I’ve only seen one person using one in the wild.) But I’m glad to see Moto continue on with the concept. The RAZR will work with two LapDocks: a new 11″ model and a 14″ one with a Webcam. And it’s come up with a new design that lets one LapDock work with a variety of phones, with a pull-out cable and slide-out tray.

Motorola hasn’t announced pricing for the new LapDocks, and I’ll be more excited about the concept when someone comes up with a laptop dock that can be used with any phone. ( In fact, I’ve been excited about the idea for years, long before LapDocks existed.) I figure there aren’t any fundamental technological roadblocks standing in the way of it happening at some point.

Ice Cream Sandwich is on the way. It’s an odd time to be buying an Android phone, because the next version of the OS, Ice Cream Sandwich, should be along very shortly. Motorola says that ICS will be available for RAZR owners, and full details will be announced within six weeks of the phone’s launch.

I plan to do a review of the RAZR; more thoughts then.

The first thing I noticed about Motorola and Verizon Wireless’s new Android phone was the name. The Droid RAZR is a neat nod to one of the most iconic phones of the pre-iPhone era. (What’s next–the Droid Star-Tac?)’

The second notable thing about the phone is how thin it is: 7.1mm, compared to 9.3mm for the iPhone 4S (and 14mm for the old original 2003 RAZR). There’s nothing inherently world-changing about that. But the RAZR is an LTE phone, and the fact that Motorola can squeeze the technology into a case so thin is a good sign that LTE designs are maturing.

I’m also curious about the phone’s battery life, a notoriously problematic area for early LTE phones. (Motorola apparently says it can deliver up to 12.5 hours of talk time, but I don’t know how real-world that figure is, or how long it’ll run for data-intensive tasks.)

Most of the RAZR’s other specs are typical fair for a high-end Android phone: It’s got a 1.2-GHz dual-core processor and a 4.3″ display. It’s $299.99 on contract and will be available on Verizon in early November.

Oh, and one other thing: This is an Android Gingerbread phone, Google still not having announced Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Google. I’m reserving any real excitement I might muster for new Android phones for the first Ice Cream Sandwich models, which should ship real http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/18/motorola-droid-razr-verizon-announced/ now…

* At TIME.com, I reviewed two new Android phones from Motorola: the potent (and battery-hungry) Droid Bionic, and the basic (and thrifty) Triumph.

* TIME also asked me to try and make sense of the drama going on over at AOL and TechCrunch. I’m not even sure if that’s possible, but I tried.

* Over at AllBusiness.com, I wrote about a newish gadget that small businesses seem to be snapping up with the same zea they once adopted IBM PCs and PalmPilots. It’s called the iPad.

Whew! (And stay turned for another bit of related news in the not-too-distant future.)

Yes, there’s a chance that Google could pull off a miracle here and transform the Motorola Mobility business into a direct competitor of Apple’s–in which Google gets not only Android distribution, but super-fat iPhone-like profit margins to boot.

But doing that will be super-challenging. Motorola’s current hardware team has displayed none of the magic that Apple’s has. And the more Google tries to mimic that magic, the more Google’s other Android partners will likely rebel against Google’s competitive threat.

 

And Android boxes in Nokia and RIM. With Motorola, which has some enterprise credibility and Android innovations, Google can enter the enterprise easier. As a result, RIM increasingly looks like the odd man out. Nokia is already under fire as it waits for Windows Phone 7 to gain traction. RIM is betting on QNX as an operating system. Google is indicating that the wireless market is a two-platform race. And those two horses are going to be Android and iOS.

It’s not that it’s a completely unthinkable merger–in fact, it’s existed as a rumor for quite a while. It just seemed really unlikely, until it happened.

Mergers that are supposed to change everything have a lousy track record of changing everything–sometimes, they don’t change anything at all, at least for the better. (They also don’t have a perfect track record of actually happening: we should be careful about assuming this is a done deal until it is.) Right now, I’m still processing the news and asking myself questions. Such as…

Will Googlemoto make fantastic phones?

We all know the story: Apple benefits enormously from being one of the few tech companies which, in Steve Jobs’ words, makes the whole widget–the hardware, the software, the services. The smoothness of the iPhone experience compared to that of Android phones shows that it’s a good idea.

Now Google will be trying a similar approach. Motorola already makes very good Android phones, but not ones which are radically better than those from other companies such as HTC and Samsung. Will being owned by Google help Motorola make phones that more seamlessly blend hardware, software, and service than other Android handsets to date? I’m not sure. But I’ll bet that HTC and Samsung hope not! (Google’s stance seems to be that Motorola will be a self-contained unit, which might argue against deep integration–but it may be saying that for political reasons as much as anything else.)

Speaking of HTC and Samsung, how do other companies which make Android devices feel about this?

Can you imagine any scenario under which they’d greet it as wonderful news? They’ll now be competing against the company that makes their operating system. It’s as if Microsoft bought Dell. Even if Google bent over backwards to maintain a level playing field, you’d have to be the Pollyanna of all Pollyannas to think that the Android device company that was part of Google wouldn’t have a huge advantage. You can practically feel the clenching of teeth in the Android partners’ supportive quotes.

So will any Android device companies dump Android, or at least de-emphasize it?

Betcha that they’re all assessing their options right now–and that some of them are looking at Windows Phone, the most significant mobile operating system that won’t be owned by a hardware company, in a new light.

How does Apple feel about this?

Can you believe that it was only two years ago that Eric Schmidt was on Google’s Apple’s board? This makes Google into Apple’s archrival in a way it never was before. Google will now make phones and tablets, and you’ve got to think that there will be Android-powered TV boxes and other devices that compete with various parts of the Apple empire. This is the most important rivalry in consumer technology, by far.

Does this have any impact on Android patent lawsuits?

Well, sure: Google will own Motorola’s giant trove of mobile patents. Suing Google or Android licensees should be less tempting if Google controls patents that would let it sue you right back. I’m not sure about how it affects lawsuits in progress, such as Oracle’s one against Google and Apple’s one against HTC, but here are some early thoughts from FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller.

Will it inspire more humongous acquisitions?

There will certainly be more deals inspired by a need to snap up patents for offensive and defensive purposes. But hmmm…will there be anything on the level of, say, Microsoft actually buying Nokia? I hope so–it would be fun to write about.

What does this mean for the problem that dare not speak its name, Android fragmentation?

It could mean more fragmentation for Android phones that aren’t made by Motorola, if companies such as HTC and Samsung decide that they best way to compete with Google’s own devices is to add differentiation through additional layers of software. (I hope they don’t go that direction, but that’s just me.) With any luck, though, the Motorola product line will eventually look like the Nexus S writ large–a bunch of phones that offer unadulterated, immediately-updated Android. The mere act of doing that would go a meaningful way towards catching up with the simplicity of the iPhone.

Other than the implications for the phone business, what’s interesting here?

To date, nobody’s managed to build a hugely appealing Android tablet. Now Google will get to try its hand at doing so itself. And how about Google TV? It’s been a flop so far, but Motorola makes DVRs and set-top boxes and sells them to TV system operators–giving Google the opportunity to reboot Google TV and try again with a new business model. (Here are some thoughts on that topic from Gigaom’s Ryan Lawler and Ryan Kim.)

What’s the nightmare scenario?

Google acts like it bought a patent portfolio that came with a handset maker, and–either willfully or through neglect, and either quickly or slowly–drives Motorola’s handset business into the ground. That would be really depressing. But Google’s press release mentions both the future of Motorola devices and patent protection as arguments in favor of the deal. And they are indeed both really important, which is why I think of this as, um, an offdensive move.

Any final thoughts?

Not final final ones–I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about this. But here’s a final thought for now. For decades, we “all knew” that Microsoft’s business model of licensing software to third-party hardware makers was superior to Apple’s philosophy of doing as much as possible itself, at least when it came to the potential for absurd profits. (Here’s one of at least ten zillion articles based on that premise.) But Apple seems to be doing just fine with its strategy. Companies like HP are mimicking it. And now Google is spending $12.5 billion to take a stab at the Apple way, without quite giving up the Microsoft way. (Its decision to both make its own devices and license its software to other companies is most reminiscent of the approach that Palm took for a few years; it didn’t work out well long-term in that case.)

Microsoft is still making boatloads of cash, too, but can we all agree that’s no longer so clear that everyone knows that it figured out the best business model for software and Apple blew it?