I queried a few of our Last Gadget Standing judges and they’ve got no shortage of opinion on which phones should be in the running for the award we’ll hand out at CES next January.

Some voiced concern about the Nokia N8 being an oddity.  Yeah, well, it’s an oddity with a 12 MP camera (with Zeiss lens) and HD video recording.  Those video watchers amongst us will be intrigued by the form factor; those who are dubious about Symbian less so.

Laptop Magazine’s Avram Piltch, already an admirer of Verizon’s Droid line, is waiting to get his hands on the Droid Pro. It may be the perfect blend of business and pleasure. Piltch is also betting on Android screens that hold up to the Apple Retina on the iPhone 4.  Joanna Stern of Engadget says that she’s a Blackberry fangirl and thinks that RIM’s Torch–currently one of the state of the art slider keyboard contenders–merits consideration.

Steve Wildstrom gave a nod to Samsung’s Galaxy S phones, available under various names on every major carrier.  I have to agree that they have sex appeal.  Everyone can agree that the HTC EVO 4G’s screen real estate is lust-worthy, too.  A few raised the Palm Pre flag, mostly out of curiosity to see what HP has planned.  Any tips?

And you?  Which new or upcoming phones would you pick as the hottest of the bunch? Your nominations could help us find our CES winner.

Verizon isn’t about to let the same thing happen to its highly anticipated Droid X. Checks by several blogs indicated average stocks of between 50 and 100 units. While not a lot, it certainly means in most cases if you’re there early, you’ll be taking home the phone that day. Boy Genius Report added that the company also has backup stock in its warehouse, so stores would be able to replenish the ones they sell.

With all the negative publicity surrounding the iPhone 4 right now, this is not the time to have supply issues, and Verizon knows this. If the reception issues of Apple’s device continue to spread through the mainstream media as they have, there’s no doubt that some may choose to purchase another phone.

I think it’s also fair to mention the two Android phones with the most serious supply issues — the EVO 4G and the Incredible — are both from HTC. The X is produced by Motorola, and with their last big hit being the Droid, they’ve obviously had more time to focus on manufacturing this latest device.

For those interested, the Droid X will become available Thursday at a price of $299.99 with a two-year agreement out the door, but a $100 mail-in rebate would put it on par with the iPhone 4.

Phones have already killed traditional PDAs dead. The best ones also render media players such as an iPod largely superfluous, and the days of standalone GPS handhelds are clearly numbered. Are we nearing the moment when a meaningful number of people will skip buying a separate camera in favor of snapping photos with a phone?

Some thoughts on that in a moment–but first, my impressions of the photographic capabilities of these two handsets. When I had plenty of natural light, I liked most of the photos from both phones quite a bit…although even the nicest portraits I took looked slightly out of focus and lacking in detail. In murkier environments, the iPhone performed better than the Droid X, although the LED flashes on both phones aren’t very useful. (They only made a noticeable difference when there was very little available light, and even then tended to produce unflattering, fuzzy portraits.)

I haven’t shot mass quantities of 720p video with either camera yet, but so far, the iPhone 4′s results are more pleasing. (The video I’ve shot with the Droid is usually noisier, especially in dim settings.)

The Droid X has a dedicated hardware shutter button; the iPhone 4 has an on-screen one. I assumed I’d prefer the Droid’s approach, but the button isn’t quite responsive enough–it’s possible to think you’ve pressed the shutter and be wrong. The iPhone let me take pictures at a faster clip, although it feels zippier than the Droid in part because it uses an animated on-screen shutter animation to distract you while it gets ready to let you take another photo. The Droid displays an honest-but-inelegant PROCESSING message after each shot, reminding you that it’s not as snappy as you’d like.

On the other hand, composing pictures with the Droid X’s Jumbotron of a display (4.3″) was easier and more entertaining than the iPhone’s relatively diminutive 3.5″ screen. Count me in as a fan of big-screen phones. I also like the way the Droid uses its GPS to indicate onscreen where a photo’s being taken. (The iPhone 4 captures geotag information, but doesn’t use it until you upload photos to a computer.)

Bottom line: I’m impressed with both phones’ camera capabilities–given that they’re phones and not cameras–but the iPhone 4 took better shots than the Droid X overall.

My impressions aren’t definitive, and the Droid X I’ve been using doesn’t have the final software. But they’re generally consistent with more methodical findings by my pals at Macworld and PCWorld. They’re also still more evidence that cameraphones’ megapixel ratings don’t have much to do with image quality: The Droid’s extra megapixels theoretically give it a major edge over the iPhone, but you couldn’t tell it from my pictures. (Note that I’ve mostly used the Droid X in a six-megapixel mode rather than the full-resolution 8MP one–the 6MP setting is the default, and I like the 16:9 aspect ratio.)

Here are a few shots I’ve taken, none of which I cropped or otherwise tampered with, except to reduce them in size (click on them to see the full-resolution versions).

First the iPhone 4:

Here’s the Droid X:

Unlike the Droid X, the iPhone 4 doesn’t have any scene modes. But its image-processing capabilities did a nice job of dealing with tricky situations. The photo below was taken in a saloon that was mostly dark, except for the light seeping in from the open door in the background. The picture isn’t perfect, but it’s better than I expected:

And while the iPhone doesn’t have a macro mode, it’s surprisingly good at focusing in on small objects from a short distance:

iPhone 4 camera vs. Droid X camera is one thing, but such comparisons don’t tell you how these cameras compare to a modern point-and-shoot. So on the Fourth of July, I snapped photos at the Independence Day parade in Solvang, California using three cameras: the ones in the iPhone 4 and Droid X and the Sony Cyber-shot HX5V which I bought a few months ago. For testing purposes, I shot about a hundred photos per device. Natural light was available in vast quantity and I wasn’t trying anything as demanding as a portrait–and just about all the pictures I took looked decent:

(For the record, the first and fourth photos above are from the iPhone 4; the second and sixth are from the Droid X; the third and fifth are from the Cyber-shot. )

Even though I was able to take respectable photos with all three devices, there was no real contest. After a hundred photos, the Sony’s battery gauge still reported that three-quarters of the charge remained. The camera’s 10X zoom let me quickly frame marching bands, old cars, and toddlers as they passed. The bright three-inch LCD gave me a very good idea of what I was about to capture. I could have shot in modes up to ten megapixels–not necessary for the Web, but useful when I want to crop with abandon or print at very large sizes. In short, I was very glad I’d bothered to bring along a real camera.

The Cyber-shot has a bunch of other nifty features that I didn’t need for the parade, but which often come in handy, such as an array of scene modes and the ability to autostitch panoramas. (The iPhone 4 makes almost all photographic decisions itself, and the Droid X offers only a smattering of settings.) I try to avoid using the Sony’s flash except when absolutely necessary, but it’s way more helpful than the dinky ones on the phones.

Taking the iPhone 4 and Droid X on a major photographic expedition turned out to be a bad idea. After I’d shot a hundred photos, their batteries were in the danger zone: Neither would have lasted for the rest of a normal day of phone calls, e-mail, and browsing without being recharged. Their digital zooms, unlike the Sony’s optical one, are cumbersome to use and enlarge the image by throwing out pixels, thereby degrading picture quality.

And here’s something weird: It was an intensely sunny day in Solvang, and an hour or so into the parade, the iPhone seemed to suffer from heat stroke. It appeared to stop backlighting its display, and it told me that it was going to shut off its flash until things cooled down. I stuck it in my pocket for a while, and when I tried again it had recovered.

So to get back to my original question, are stand-alone point-and-shoot cameras an endangered species? No, not yet. They’re capable of taking much better pictures and offer far more photographic settings than their smartphone brethren. And absent several technological breakthroughs, I don’t see how phones will catch up with point-and-shoots. Big lenses outperform little lenses, and optical zooms still take up so much space that (almost) nobody tries to cram one into a phone.

It’s worth nothing that cameraphones beat point-and-shoots in respects that go beyond image quality. The Droid X and iPhone 4 both use their GPS capabilities to geotag your pictures, a feature that’s still pretty exotic on “real” cameras. (The Cyber-shot has it, although it’s harder to use than on the iPhone and Droid.) They let you instantly share pictures in an array of ways, rather than making you wait until you can transfer images to a computer. They’ve got bigger LCDs than nearly any traditional camera. I have a hunch that smartphones like these will influence future point-and-shoots–hey, how about a camera that runs Android?

Ultimately, the new wave of fairly-decent smartphone cameras are a boon: If you’ve got one of these phones along, you should always be able to take a photo that’s way better than no photo at all–and which might, under the right circumstances, compete with a photo that you’d take with a point-and-shoot. But when I know I’m going to take photos I want to keep, I’m still going to tote my Cyber-shot. And I’m reasonably confident it’s not the last real camera I’ll ever buy.

Remind me to come back to this topic in two or three years, though. I reserve the right to be utterly wrong about all this…

At an event in New York City–which I watched via Webcast from here in San Francisco–Verizon Wireless just announced the Droid X, its latest Motorola Android smartphone. I’ve given up trying to determine if any particular Android phone is the most impressive one to day–the honor changes every few weeks–but the X is clearly among the top ones so far in terms of sheer specs. It’s got a 1-GHz TI CPI, a big 4.3″ LCD display with 854-by-480 resolution in a thin case, 512MB of RAM, both 8GB of fixed storage and a 16GB MicroSD card, HDMI out, an 8MP camera that does 720p video, Android 2.1 (2.2 will come along late in the summer), and the ability to act as a wireless hotspot for up to five devices.

[NOTE/UPDATE: Verizon made a big deal out of the X supporting Flash--Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen was in New York for the unveiling--but it's not shipping with Flash. Instead, it's "Flash ready," which is a total misnomer: Flash requires Android 2.2, which the X doesn't yet have. But this phone will run Flash. Eventually.]

The X will go for $199.99 after a $100 rebate with a two-year contract, and Verizon customers whose contracts are up in 2010 can get it for that price. Data plans cost $29.99 for “unlimited” access; the Wi-Fi hotspot feature is $20 extra a month for 2GB of data.

Oh, and it doesn’t go on sale until July 15th…although you don’t need an advanced degree in marketing to figure out why Verizon is announcing it today.

More thoughts–including hands-on impressions–soon.

[UPDATE: The Droid X's resolution is the same as that of the Droid, and Verizon has rescinded its claim that it has a 720p HD screen.]