Officially, the Friday launch of the Droid and the Droid Eris went swimmingly, backed up by anecdotal reports from the stores themselves.

While it may take a day or two to truly assess how the launch went, a small poll of stores in Northern California, a tech haven, proved that Verizon had a hit on its hands.

"It's going great," Heidi Flato, a Verizon spokeswoman representing Northern California, reported. "It's going really great. Everyone's very happy."

"We do have lots of inventory," she added. "My understanding is that we were prepared for the launch." Flato declined to say how many phones had been allocated to each store, or if supplies were running low at by midday Pacific time.

However, store employees seemed to indicate the best of all possible worlds: a happy customer base, lines, but enough phones for everyone. One employee in a Sacramento Verizon store reported that they had been given 100 phones per store, at least in his region. Another manager, in the East Bay, said that figure "sounded about right". Two stores in the San Jose region referred questions to Verizon public relations representatives.

Perusing Verizon's fall lineup yesterday, I was disappointed to see such a range of drab, black and gray phones, perhaps reflecting the drab, black and gray state of our national economy and indeed our very souls.

Picking up shiny new Motorola Droid this weekend? Have you fingers crossed for some PC tethering? Well, Verizon has some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that the wireless provider is indeed letting owner utilize their handset as a wireless modem for the computers. The bad news? It's going to cost you--$30 a month in fact. That's roughly the price of the phone normal data fees.

Still, at least the companies are offer the feature, unlike some people *cough* AT&T.

Love fancy new phones but hate paying money for things? Flipswap wants to help with its new "iDon't Pay for Droid" promotion. The company is giving away money toward the purchase of a new Motorola Droid: You can swap your current iPhone for up to $350, buy a Droid, and show your proof of purchase, and you'll get an extra $25.

Okay, it's not exactly a free phone (not even close, really), but who can blame the company for riding the Droid wave?

Interested parties can get the Droid bonus between now (well, tomorrow, when the Droid goes on sale) and November 30th by entering the promo code "getdroid" into the Flipswap site. More info is available at Flipswap's Droid site.

Quirky, the site that makes and sells the best of its community-developed concepts, just posted another why-didn't-I-think-of-that product in the beamer: It's an iPhone case that lights up to illuminate your phonecam photo subjects or just to help you find stuff in the dark. Press the button once for 10 seconds of LED light, twice to keep it on till you turn it off. The replaceable coin-cell battery is rated to last for 10 hours.

The case itself is hard plastic and comes in "one of Quirky's funky case colors," apparently including pink or black. If you want a beamer, get over to the presale at the site and "commit" to buying one for $32; when 500 people have committed, the case will be manufactured and shipped to buyers.

Along with a slew of other new devices like the Droid Eris, Verizon Wireless on Thursday debuted the Casio G'zOne Brigade--a waterproof flip phone with a full QWERTY keyboard and a 3.2-megapixel camera.

Verizon claims the phone is "water, shock, dust, vibration, humidity, salt fog, altitude, high temperature storage, low temperature storage, and solar radiation resistant." Basically it's the sort of phone a wilderness explorer, geologist, or Navy SEAL would love to carry around.

The phone is trying to target some of the office crowd as well by including a document viewer for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF support. It will also include standard Verizon software such as V CAST Music with Rhapsody and V CAST Video, along with support for VZ Navigator.

This new phone is the first of the G'zOne line with a QWERTY keyboard. We liked that the last unit of this family--the G'zOne Boulder--was seemingly indestructible, but it had muddy voice quality. Hopefully all the kinks have been worked out for sleek-looking Brigade.

Price and availability of the G'zOne Brigade will be announced closer to launch.

BlackBerry plays well with others - when they come out with a product on one carrier, it often appears pretty quickly on other carriers as well. So we made sure to give Sprint a call when Verizon Wireless announced their BlackBerry Curve 8530, an upgrade to the popular BlackBerry 8330 that gives it a faster processor, new OS version and a tiny touchpad instead of the trackball.

The Motorola Droid doesn't go on sale until tomorrow, but Verizon Wireless is already pushing the second device in that line: the Verizon Droid Eris. Essentially a rebranded version of Sprint's HTC Hero, the Eris (see it in action in the above video) goes on sale the same day as the Motorola Droid, but for $99 ($100 less than Motorola's handset).

The Eris runs Android 1.5, features a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, and a 528-MHz Qualcomm processor (less powerful than the Motorola's ARM Cortex-A8). For more information on the handset, along with a slideshow, check out PCMag.com.

T-Mobile and Nokia announced that the Nokia 3711, first unveiled last month, is now in T-Mobile retail stores and online at T-Mobile's Web site for $69.99 with a two-year contract.

The big news with this one is Nokia Maps, which lets subscribers find their current location, and then search nearby for points of interest using a T-Mobile data plan.

The flip 3711 also includes a 2-megapixel camera, a hidden-until-lit external display (similar to the Nokia 7205 Intrigue on Verizon), T-Mobile's web2go browser, stereo Bluetooth, a media player, IM and e-mail support, and Nokia's Series 40 OS.

Samsung Mobile has unveiled the Samsung Mythic and Samsung Flight, two phones that will hit AT&T stores and AT&T's Web site on November 8th.

The black Mythic looks sort of similar to the existing Solstice. It sports a 3.3-inch touch screen, along with Samsung's TouchWiz user interface for dragging and dropping semi-useful widgets all over the home screen. The Mythic also features quick Facebook and MySpace access, along with support for AT&T Mobile TV and AT&T Navigator.

The Flight (pictured), meanwhile, is a vertical slider--something we're seeing more and more of lately, after a few years on hiatus. The Flight features a somewhat cramped-looking QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen. It includes one-touch access to Web favorites, app shortcuts, SMS, MMS, instant messaging, and mobile e-mail. The Flight will be available in red or white.

No pricing information is available as of yet.

So you're excited about the upcoming Motorola Droid, but you're a bit of a rolling stone when it comes to settling down with wireless carrier contracts. The Android-based handset finally got an official month-to-month contract price, by way of the official Verizon Android Twitter account.

Interested parties will have to plunk down $559.99 for the honor of owning the phone sans-contract. The Editors' Choice-winning handset will arrive in stores this Friday, priced at $199 for those who don't mind contracts.

Jitterbug announced that it has acquired MobiWatch for the latter's Mobile Personal Emergency Response Technology (M-PERS).

Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed. Jitterbug plans to offer customers personal safety features through its various Jitterbug handsets, such as the ability to call trained emergency response personnel. Jitterbug said in a statement that it plans to begin offering those services in late 2010.

Back in August, Verizon announced that the Samsung Jitterbug J would now run primarily on Verizon with new plan pricing. Before that, Jitterbug phones had run primarily on Sprint's network, and roamed on Verizon and other carriers.