Pay More For A Motorola Droid That May Not Work

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Ever want to own a (supposed) piece of cell phone history? An alleged engineering prototype of the Motorola Droid has shown up on eBay, with a starting bid of $485. The Droid, which runs Google’s Android 2.0 OS, was released earlier this month, with a price of $200 (subsided with a service plan, of course) by American provider Verizon.

According to the eBay listing, the prototype is ‘a pre-release verison’ and ‘was made strictly for Motorola engineers’. The seller doesn’t exactly speculate on where he got the phone, but judging by the wording of the eBay listing, he doesn’t appear to be a Motorola engineer.

The seller says the phone is ‘working perfectly’ and can be used with an cellular network. The pictures of the operating system appear to be running the regular version of Google Android. If you were even concerned, it comes with a phone charger. Despite the seller’s claims that the phone works well, he does say can’t guarantee it will work perfectly.

This really appears to be the real deal. The pictures on the eBay listing show the phone looks slightly different from the off-the-shelf one and instead of the provider logo near the mouthpiece, the phone features an apt warning, “Confidental: Motorola Restricted Property: Not For Sale”. Ooops.

Note that this probably isn’t a debug unit that will let you hack into Verizon’s network and cause havoc, it simply appears to be a pre-release regular unit. Despite some mild coverage over the tech blogosphere today, there STILL aren’t any bids, so if you’re interested in paying more for a regular Motorola Droid, albeit one with an interesting story, then you better fire up that PayPal account.