The Motorola Droid, on Verizon Wireless, is, by all accounts, pretty OK. That’s fair to say, no? Yes, I believe it is. What’s lame, though totally to be expected, is that it’ll cost you $30 for a car kit. And you’d want said car kit in order to make that Google navigation application really fly.

Alright, everyone, settle down. I know the Google Maps Navigation stuff is pretty amazing, but let’s not write off the traditional GPS makers just yet. They’re not going anywhere for a while. Your parents and friends will see to that.

Hopefully the sudden market loss that companies like Garmin and TomTom saw yesterday will wake the companies up and see that they are doing it wrong. They are in the habit of producing 78 different versions of the same GPS. Each model steps you up $20 and adds another feature. It’s a ridiculous business plan and totally opposite what successful companies are doing.

But it’s true. Google dropped a bombshell on GPS makers yesterday with its free navigation tool that trumps almost anything currently available. The Android 2.0 app is about as robust as you can get thanks to the always connected Android OS and almighty Google. You can simply say “Where is the Best Buy in Flint, MI” and it will take you there. All this is free from the “do no evil” company, Google.

Google is going to make a lot of frequent flyers, and Virgin America, happy this holiday season. As a gift to people who fly on Virgin America’s WiFi-equipped planes, Google will be footing the bill for everybody on board between November 10, 2009, and January 15, 2010.

For Google, this is a smart marketing move because it generates tons of good will among everyone who flies Virgin America. But Google is really giving a gift to Virgin America in the form of yet one more incentive to fly its planes over competitors’. Will American Airlines and others with WiFi on board have to respond with their own freebie giveaways? I hope so.

Google has been making Maps and Earth are a bit more social these days, letting users create 3D buildings and using crowdsourcing to help update changes in terrain and on roads. Now Google Street View is hoping to engage users by letting them suggest spots where the “Trike” should venture.

Oh, newfangled world. You are so full of wonders. And people have so much free time to adorn you with useless but amazing things, like this map of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s escapades in “My Posse’s On Broadway.” In the end, he really only cruises down a couple streets then goes and eats (twice), but that’s not the point. Adam Cohn has recontextualized 80s hip hop into Web 2.0, which is a one-way ticket to either hell or heaven, I can’t decide which.

We’ve seen a few different Android devices that seem to be VZW-bound over the last few weeks, but Verizon hasn’t said anything about the handsets or platform until now. The company has a webcast scheduled for later today but released a preemptive press release that outlines the basics.

Verizon and Google have formed a strategic partnership that will “leverage the Verizon Wireless network and the best of the Android open platform to deliver leading-edge mobile applications, services and devices.” Apparently the new dream team has plans that involve co-developing several Android-based devices that will come pre-loaded with innovative applications from not only Verizon, but also 3rd-party developers.

At ease, soldiers. The Pirate Bay is back in the Google search index. I understand this was eating at your very soul for some time now.

The Pirate Bay just can’t catch a break these days. I won’t bore you with the past, but today’s juicy gossip is: Google has removed The Pirate Bay from its search index because of a DMCA complaint!

In case you haven’t had enough location-based news tonight, here’s another very interesting bit. It looks like Apple has very quietly bought an online mapping company, Seth Weintraub of Computerworld reports tonight.

Apple’s purchase of Placebase actually took place this past July, and a founder of a partner company that was using Placebase maps tweeted about it. But it slid under most people’s radars as that was the only news out there about it. But Weintraub dug up Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman’s LinkedIn profile tonight, and sure enough, he is now part of the “Geo Team” at Apple.

After Google dropped the L-bomb on Cyanogen, he reportedly opened up talks with the boys in Goo. It sounds like they may have finally reached a compromise in their little disagreement. Is it a good thing? Maybe, maybe not.

This past week saw the resurrection of Net Neutrality as a divisive issue. Some folks (people like Google, and, well, us) are in favor of Net Neutrality, while other folks (primarily the ISPs) are against it. Not long after the FCC announced its intentions, six Republican senators, three of which who received quite a lot of money from AT&T, proposed an amendment to a bill to stop the FCC in its tracks. The senators later rescinded their amendment, saying that they were now open to a “dialogue” with the FCC.

If you’ve rooted and modded your Android phone you’ve probably found Cyanogen, one of the best sources for modded Android ROMs out there. All of his ROMs are stable, usable on the G1 and MyTouch, and well-designed.

Google, however, takes issue with him releasing closed-source Google apps like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube and has sent him a cease and desist. They’re not particularly mad about the ROMs, mind you, just the apps inside them.

Google has been very much about saving out of print books by moving them into a digital format over the last seven years. This has been a part of their Google Book Search project, which involved pulling books out of libraries and scanning them in, and thus preserving them forever. Of course, some people prefer a hard copy, and now that’s going to be a possibility as well, at least at some locations.

Looks like Google Street View is in the news again today, but for all the wrong reasons. A Swiss agency has threatened to sue Google because it hasn’t taken to proper privacy considerations into effect, saying that “many images are problematic and insufficiently anonymous.”

What a market leader and major dealer in capital does publicly with their money is revealing. One of the things I admire about Microsoft is that through their Labs and Research initiatives, they’ve done a lot of good work in fields only tangentially connected with Microsoft markets.

Google has some initiatives of their own (if you didn’t know), and green power has been among their favored funding targets for a few years now.Recently they’ve decided that solar power isn’t efficient enough. Well observed, Google! They must have Binged it.

Google is clearly moving fast in setting up partnerships with ebook reader manufacturers and store operators to give some weight to its threat to Amazon and the latter’s Kindle product line.

First, the company teamed up with Sony, adding about 1 million public domain books to the technology giant’s eBook Store.

Now Mountain View has sealed a deal with British Interead, bringing the same amount of ebooks to an online store outside the U.S. for the first time (where close to half a million of them are available for free).

Here it is, AT&T’s statement on what they sent to the FCC regarding the rejection of the Google Voice app on the iPhone. As you can see, unlike last time where the statement was vague, AT&T is clearly stating here that it had nothing to do with the Google Voice rejection. This wording comes from Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president, external and legislative affairs. Updated with the full AT&T response to the FCC

We’re reaching out to Apple on this right now and will update.

AT&T Statement on Letter to the FCC Regarding Apple App Store