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.

Verizon Wireless is offering 25% off a trio of its QWERTY-equipped phones: the Motorola Rival, LG enV3, and the Samsung Alias 2.

How many hours ago did it “break” that the Palm Pre wasn’t going to be available on Verizon Wireless? Yeah, well, now word on the street is that, forget everything you read last night, because there’s no way in hell the Palm Pre won’t be available for Verizon Wireless. Or, to remove the double-negative: yes, the Palm Pre will, indeed, be available on Verizon Wireless, most likely this winter. Calm yourselves.

T-Mobile, Sprint, and now Verizon Wireless. Yup, the HTC Touch Pro 2 should be ready and waiting for you at your local VZW store on September 11. In what may be the first example of VZW customers getting a deal (compared to the other carriers), the phone is only $199 after $100 rebate and two-year contract.

It hasn’t been a secret for months, but Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam has confirmed that a multitude of devices from RIM, Palm and Android-based devices are coming to the nation’s largest network in the next six months.

A fascinating bit of Apple gossip for your Tuesday morning, gossip that piggybacks on the never-going-to-die “iPhone on Verizon Wireless?” rumor. Does an “iPhone lite” interest you? Or perhaps a “media pad that would let users listen to music, view photos, and watch high-definition videos” that makes calls using Wi-Fi?

Of the 4.3 million iPhone subscribers that AT&T added to its books in 2008, about 40 percent of them were new customers. It’s that type of growth that has AT&T scrambling to retain its exclusivity arrangement with Apple, which is expected to expire next year. If that agreement were to expire, Apple would be free to take the iPhone to other wireless carriers, like T-Mobile or Verizon Wireless (though Apple would have to develop a CDMA version of the phone first to bring it to VZW).

Sierra Wireless just broke the mold with the USB 598. The wireless broadband access USB modem is meant for Verizon Wireless, but thanks to the carrier’s open network policies, the modem can be purchased from retailers other than VZW. This means, our contract hating or poor credit friends, you can buy this modem for a decient price of $199 directly from Sierra Wireless instead of dealing with rebates and blood oaths directly from the carrier.

I can’t tell you how many iPhones I’ve seen in the past 24 hours here at SXSW Interactive. The best, though, is when you see these people cursing AT&T, saying things like, “Why would AT&T beef up its network in Austin when it knows 8 zillion iPhone users will be swarming the city for the next week?” This phenomenon—people being unhappy with the cellphone service, despite the flashy ads promising “amazing speed” and “more bars all over the damn place”—was picked up by the Times. The important thing to take away is that while companies are trying their best to improve cellphone service, there’s several technological hurdles that they have to overcome in order to deliver a truly worry-free phone.

A study is about to be released that says consumers are paying a hell of a lot more than they need to for cellphone access. The average person in San Diego—let’s assume the data can be extrapolated to the rest of the country—pays $3.02 per minute for cellphone service; removing outliers from the equation—people who pay for a ton of minutes but only use a few of them—and the figure drops to between $0.50-$1.00 per minute.

Verizon Wireless launched its creatively named CDM8975 Push to Talk handset today. This new business-meets-multimedia walkie-talkie mobile phone was developed by Personal Communications Devices and comes dressed to impress, er, ready for the job site as it’s wrapped in an “industrial clamshell.”

The CDM8975 will be available beginning March 9th, online and in good ol’ fashion meatspace, for $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a new two-year customer agreement.

Can’t you just feel the excitement building?! Specs after the jump…

It’s no secret that I loathe the BlackBerry Storm and for good reason. For my own sanity and to keep Marc M. at bay we won’t get into why, but as a lover of BlackBerrys I’m giving the Storm another shot, but I doubt my initial impressions will change regardless of the firmware upgrades. The touch-screen just hurts my thumbs. A clickable screen? Come on. I know you can do better than that, RIM.

The numbers speak for themselves. Verizon was banking on the Storm and they obviously came up short with roughly half a million units sold in the first month. It’s a respectable number for sure, but compared to what Apple and AT&T did with the iPhone and iPhone 3G is astounding.

According to BGR, Verizon Wireless might be discounting a cornucopia of handsets and EV-DO dongles as early as tomorrow. Motorola makes up the majority of the handsets, but VZW, LG, Casio, Samsung and RIM make up the rest. The most surprising is the Storm. But it looks as if the discount won’t be anything significant. The MIR is expected to jump from $50 to $70 amounting to an additional $20. Hit the jump for the list of devices that could see a discount starting tomorrow.