This 30-second Droid spot started airing last night during the ALCS. Dan may not like it, but even so there’s no denying that Verizon, in the words of Matt Buchanan, has gone totally balls in with an Android phone.

An Android 2.0 Motorola phone, to be precise, which we’ll officially get to see sometime in November.

Until then, we can feast on rumours and speculation, revel in the broadside Verizon fired against Apple (not AT&T, it should be noted), and of course dissect the actual marketing itself, as was done at Daring Fireball:

1. The whole site is Flash.
2. The animation is pretty close to the commercial they showed during tonight’s Yankees-Angels game, which (I’ve heard) will be in heavy rotation during football games tomorrow.
3. Those “iDon’t”s, with the straight primes instead of proper apostrophes, make the commercial look slapdash.
4. Seems pretty clear that Verizon isn’t getting the iPhone any time soon.
5. The small print notes that “Droid” is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., licensed to Verizon.
6. It’ll be running Android 2.0.

All interesting stuff, yes, but is it weird that the biggest bit of news out of all this, to me, is that George Lucas controls the word droid? [Verizon, Daring Fireball]

Microsoft is set to bombard us all with Windows 7 ads around the October 22nd launch—and director Marty Martin’s concept spots are setting the bar high.

The spots are all the more impressive when you find out that they were shot with the Canon 5D Mark II for Microsoft on a tight 3-day deadline. Hopefully, Martin’s work is a good indicator of where Microsoft plans to take the campaign. [istartedsomething via ars technica]

Many of the upgrade paths here are illogical and unlikely to come into play (Vista Starter 64 to anything for example) but to simplify things a bit, if your upgrade path falls in a green box, congratulations—your upgrade process will be easier and will preserve your current files, settings and programs. If you fall in the sea of blue there, that means you will have to perform a “Custom Install” which falls somewhere in between an upgrade and a fresh install. If you are still confused, head on over to ZDNet and check out a simplifed version of the chart. [Mossblog via ZDNet]

The key and OEM certificate were extracted from Win 7 Ultimate’s .wim files. A similar method was used to bypass Vista, and those vulnerabilities were never addressed so there is no reason to suspect that Microsoft will do anything about it now (but there are no guarantees). Supposedly, the crack works with 32-bit and 64-bit Ultimate versions and can be implemented on HP, Dell, and MSI computers in addition to Lenovo. Of course, you would need to engage in a little BIOS magic to fool the OS that you are using an OEM machine before any of this would work in the first place. [Softpedia via Download Squad via Lifehacker]

That developer is one Romaine Guy, an Android framework engineer, and his big revelation today is that will not support multitouch, an that it is not actually Android 2.0.

Sad, but the information is still a bit ambiguous. We also don’t have any additional word on the other features we told you about yesterday, including universal search, text-to-speech, automated backups, a new camera app, supposedly better performance, and CDMA support (ammo for an imminent Sprint launch). [Google Android Group via Engadget]

Apparently, a Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that “you will not need to reinstall an older version of Windows before using an Windows 7 upgrade disk.” Awesome right? No, not really. The problem is that you will not be able keep your current programs and data using this method. Instead, you are performing a “custom installation” that will herd all of your personal files into a folder labled “WINDOWS.OLD.” The items in that folder are dead to the world, so you will have to reinstall—essentially making it more like a fresh install than an upgrade. However, since you don’t have a full copy you would have to install XP or Vista first then upgrade to Win 7 should you ever have to reinstall down the line.

Yeah, it’s kind of a hassle, but we can always hope that the process will be simplified before it goes live on October 22nd. [TechBlog]

Windows site TechInvaders has even gone so far as to provide those always coveted screen captures and the SETUP EXE that they say prove Windows 7 build 7600 is the final one. More from the WPC this week, to be sure. [TechInvaders]

Some of the products on this list were or are vital to the computing industry as we know it, especially the dearly departed Palm OS and the sure-to-infuriate-fanboys inclusion of Linux. But then…who the hell ever heard of Inferno? [Silicon Alley Insider via Switched]

Here’s what Google says: “Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks” and “most of the user experience takes place on the web.” That is, it’s “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel” with the web as the platform. It runs on x86 processors (like your standard Core 2 Duo) and ARM processors (like inside every mobile smartphone). Underneath lies security architecture that’s completely redesigned to be virus-resistant and easy to update. Okay, that tells us, um, not much.

After all, Google’s Android is a mobile OS that runs on top of a Linux kernel. But Chrome OS is different! Android is designed to work on phones and set-top boxes and other random gadgets. Chrome OS is “designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems” for “people who spend most of their time on the web.” Hey wait, they both run on netbooks? Hmm!

Since the official blog post is all Google has said about Chrome OS and it doesn’t say much, let’s do something I learned in college, turning tiny paragraphs into pages of “deep reading.”

It seems like there are two possibilities for what Chrome OS is, on a general level. The more mundane, and frankly uninspired, possibility is that it’s essentially a Linux distro with a custom user interface running the Chrome browser. As someone quipped on Twitter (sorry I don’t remember who), if you uninstall everything but Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu, would that be the Firefox OS? What’s the difference between Chrome OS and a version of Chrome with Google Gears on Intel’s pretty Moblin OS?

The other possibility is more interesting. Look at this closely: “Most of the user experience takes place on the web.” The software architecture is simply “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.” That sounds familiar. A lot like Mike Arrington’s CrunchPad, actually, which boots directly into the WebKit browser running on top of Linux.

Meaning? The entire experience of the CrunchPad takes place on the internet, and the web is its “platform” as well, essentially. Chrome is WebKit based as well. (I’m surprised Arrington didn’t mention this in his post, actually.) If I had to guess, I’d say Chrome OS is somewhere in between an entirely browser-based OS and a generic Linux distro, though leaning toward the former.

But running a full computer like Chrome OS based entirely on web apps is crazy, right—I mean, what if you’re not online? There are two things that show it actually might not be completely retarded.

You can already use Gmail offline. I think that will be really indicative of other app experiences in a totally web-oriented Chrome OS with Google Gears. The same goes for Google Docs in offline mode, an option some people have been using for over a year. It’s no coincidence that Google pulled “Beta” off of its web apps the day it announced Chrome OS.

Another reason it might work is Palm’s WebOS on the Pre, where most of the apps, like Pandora, are written simply using web languages (it, too, is running WebKit on top of Linux kernel). As Harry McCracken notes, it seems like a prime opportunity for Google’s long rumoured GDrive online storage to finally rear its head, picking up on the line “people want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.” That could make Chrome OS wildly more compelling. And don’t get me started on all the app-like possibilities from HTML5 by the time Chrome OS launches in the second half of 2010.

Actually, the more minimal it is, the more I think Chrome OS could be better, in some ways, than Android. Google half-assed a lot of Android at launch (UI inconsistencies, missing video player). If Chrome OS really is just a glorified browser, Google can afford to be that lethargic—all they have to do is maintain the browser, and everyone else will take care of the web apps. Which developers will code, because they’ll run on any OS with a browser—Windows, OS X, whatever—and because the web as a platform is the way things are going. Even Microsoft knows this, deep down, as their Gazelle browser project shows.

How will you sync an iPod, manage printers and network drives, or yank photos and videos from your camera? We don’t know. Some things may be impossible. Will there be an uproar, like there was with iPhone 1.0, about the limitations of webapps? Surely someone will bitch.

But I can almost see a day where phones run Chrome OS, too, when wireless internet is truly ubiquitous. It seems obvious, now, that this is Google’s long-haul play—not Android, even. Either way, Microsoft doesn’t have to be scared today. But they might be in about a year.