As Motorola’s Droid smartphone readies for launch, the mobile industry is rife with geeky-yet-endearing Star Wars references. Most seem to fall into the camp that this is the droid we’re looking for (check out PC World for a good round-up), but it begs the question of which droid? Will Motorola’s smartest smartphone be the multilingual (and often long-winded) C-3PO, the chirpy R2-D2 or perhaps a battle droid from the less-than-endearing second series of Star Wars prequels?

In some ways, the latter reference might be the most appropriate, now that we know Droid is not just a model but a brand. It is, in short, the first in a veritable army of devices designed to fight for domination in the increasingly contentious smartphone space.

Of course, that battle is also about individual soldiers. As with Palm’s Pre, the Droid is Motorola’s comeback device – Motorola’s first real opportunity in years to recapture some of the luster it once had in the Razr’s heyday. Droid also marks a big line in the sand for the Android platform. As I alluded in a previous post, the alliance of Verizon and Android (with the right devices – check) should provide a big boost to carrier and OS alike (and increase distribution for apps in Android Market).

The larger question is: who’s fighting whom in this battle? Naturally, sitting as it does at the top of the smartphone heap, the iPhone is always the point of comparison for any new smartphone that comes to market, but it isn’t always the target (TechCrunch very ably covers this issue here).

I tend to subscribe to the notion that Apple and Google are more frenemies than enemies, with the recent skirmish over the Google Voice app and the ensuing board of directors drama more of a distraction than anything else, at least for the time being. For now, the two will be loosely allied in a “the-enemy-of-my-friend-is-my-enemy” sort of way against Microsoft. In other words, think of mobile as an important front, but in a much larger (and longer) war for computing supremacy.

Along the way, a rebel alliance is bound to emerge, and we know how that story goes….

Some interesting nuggets from today’s newsletter article comparing smartphones.

If you look more carefully at the CFI Group study, the satisfaction data doesn’t seem all that disparate, with some exceptions. For example, the BlackBerry and Treo tend to index lower for some of the multimedia functions, which makes sense given that these two devices have historically been oriented toward business use. This person nails it:

Generally speaking, the answer is “not much”. Deltas of +/- 5% aren’t really that statistically significant, especially as you get down to smaller and smaller sample sizes.

Some of the usage data seems more significant for the conventional wisdom it appears to debunk, such as the generally accepted fact that iPhone users do more with their devices. This data seems to be saying that owners of Android devices and Palm Pres use several of the content/media categories (e.g. checking voice mail, checking/sending email, using maps) to an equal or greater extent.