After just 24 hours and almost 250 entries later, we are ready to announce the 50 Droid Life readers who will be invited into the closed Swype beta program!  Swype came to us yesterday realizing that our community is in love with their product and wanted to give back.  So here we go!

And the winners (from the forums) are…  

A new Verizon roadmap of sorts has leaked out from a variety of sources through Engadget and we’ve grabbed the major bullet points which affect your Droid lives.  The entire roadmap basically highlighted every Android device expected to hit VZW over the next few months, but we picked out the “Droid” friendly ones.

Here is what the new rumors suggest…

• Motorola Droid Pro tentatively scheduled for late October or early November. It’s listed as having a 1.3GHz processor, Froyo, global radios, and Flash 10. We still have every reason to believe this is the phone we’ve been calling the Droid 2 World Edition (or Global Edition), but it’s unclear whether it’ll replace the Droid 2 altogether.

• HTC Merge / Lexicon / Lexikon coming in late October / early November, too. Don’t be fooled: all of these code names refer to the same device, and even Verizon’s communication uses both “Merge” and “Lexicon” interchangeably. As expected, it’s a global phone with a 1GHz Snapdragon.

• Motorola Stingray tablet in Q1 of 2011. Now this is interesting. We’d previously thought the Stingray would be a smaller tablet, but it now seems it’ll be a full 10 inches with Android 3.0 Gingerbread, 16GB of on-board storage, and Tegra 2. Oh, but that’s not the best part: it’ll also be “hardware upgradeable to LTE,” initially launching with CDMA alone. Whether that means you’ll need to purchase and insert some sort of module or something, we’re not exactly sure.

What can we make of this?  Word from our sources after the break.

The Android Developers team announced today that developers from 20 new countries can sell paid apps on the Android Market and an additional 18 countries will be added after that over the next few weeks.  This confirms our report from last week, but to our surprise is more than we expected.  Also, users from 32 countries will now be able to purchase apps.  That’s growth baby…

We have been hard at work on this and it is my pleasure to announce that effective today, developers from 20 more countries can now sell paid apps on Android Market. Additionally, over the next 2 weeks, users in 18 additional countries will be able to purchase paid apps from Android Market.

Support for paid application sales is now expanded to developers in 29 countries, with today’s additions of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

In addition, Android Market users from 32 countries will be able to buy apps…

A global Android world that seems to be expanding by the minute.  Awesome.

Source:  Android Developers Blog

We got our hands on the HTC Merge/Lexikon user guide today and all of your Bing worries have been confirmed.  The guide also confirms that it is indeed a global phone, has a slide-out keyboard and Froyo, but that’s about it.  The name was left off of it as that is clearly still being debated and no other specs were revealed that we don’t already know.

We’re also pretty sure that this will NOT be the next Droid.  We’ve heard murmurs from a few sources that it was at one time under consideration, but as far as we know will no longer become a part of this exclusive family of smartphones.

More UG shots after the break.  

Apparently Handcent has already figured out a way to fix the text message issue that has plagued the Droid X since its Android 2.2 update.  The newest version 3.3.0 just hit the market in the last couple of hours and has “Droid X 2.2 Support.”   A couple of readers have already said that this fixes the 4-hour time gap that was plaguing many of you, but we want to hear from everyone.

New Handcent update fix your DX text message issues?

Cheers @antroyd!

We brought you the first look of the Droid 2 Global last week with some super crisp and clear shots, but today, an entirely new batch has popped up via AndroidSpin.  There aren’t a lot of new details since we already showed you that it runs at 1.2GHz and pumps out ridiculous benchmarks, but you do get to see the SIM card and a few additional shot angles.  Now if only a last minute change would include a 4″ screen, we’d buy it!

More shots after the break.  

Calling all Droid 2 users!  Actually, to any Droid users in general out there, we want to know what interested you about this device or which part of it is still impressing you.  We asked you about the Droid X already, but now it’s the D2′s turn.  Your favorite feature is?

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