The well-hyped Droid X smartphone officially launched today on Verizon. Verizon claims that "hundreds" of people lined up at some Verizon Wireless corporate retail stores to be the first to buy the Android-based handset. Droid X day one has also seen a bit of controversy due to an alleged lockdown of ROM hacking by Motorola. We're in the process of putting the device through its paces for our usual in-depth review, but since we've had our review units for a few days, we wanted to share our first impressions of the hardware.

Obviously, the phone is dominated by the enormous 4.3" 854x480 pixel touchscreen display. The size is similar to the HTC EVO 4G, and is simply impressive in person. The display is bright and sharp—and the 16:9 ratio is perfect for watching HD video.

The handset is also quite thin (at 0.39", it's just a hair thicker than the iPhone 4's 0.37") except near the top of the device, which has a rather thick bulge where the camera hardware is located. It fits comfortably enough in regular jeans pockets, but the bulge in particular is noticeable. Fans of skinny jeans should consider something else.

The finish on the back is a smooth matte rubber-like material, which gives a positive grip feel in the hand and won't slide around on a table, but still easily slides in and out of a pocket. A large slide-off panel gives access to the removable Li-Ion battery as well as the MicroSD removable storage. In the thick bulge at the top is the 8MP camera module with dual-LED flash. It came as somewhat of a surprise when we discovered it uses a mechanical shutter.

The camera takes pretty good pictures in daylight, but indoors and low-light pictures are barely tolerable. The decision to crank the number of megapixels to have a higher number on a spec sheet was unwise in our opinion.

The device features a mechanical shutter release button on the bottom right, which is perfect for taking landscape orientation photos, but less-than-ideal for portraits. On the top, there's a lock/unlock/power button, on the top right there's a rocker switch for volume and digital zoom, and on the front there are four mechanical standard Android control buttons. The buttons have a nice, clicky feel to them, but in our testing the shutter button was finicky when it came to actually triggering the shutter. On the bottom right is a micro USB port for charging and data transfer, and a micro HDMI port for connecting to an HDTV or other HDMI-equipped display.

Unlike the EVO, the Droid X offers all-day battery life under heavy use and several days on standby. This is partly due to Motorola's custom power management framework and better default settings out of the box. We are also impressed with Motorola's messaging application, which has a broad feature set and provides a unified inbox for e-mail, text messages, and social network correspondence.

Look for our full review, along with tons of sample pics and our impressions of Motorola's Android customizations, coming in a few days.