Over at CNET, MOTO Development Group president Gregor Berkowitz has a new column that looks under the hood of Motorola’s Droid smartphone to evaluate what made the product successful — and how it could be improved.

This much is clear: Motorola positioned the Droid to be the anti-iPhone. While the iPhone is sleek and rounded, the Droid is square and angular. Where the iPhone seems lightweight and delicate, the Droid feels heavy and rugged… so much so that Gregor calls it the “Hummer of smartphones.”

The obstacles Motorola faced in bringing the Droid to market and re-establishing its own relevance as a maker of cutting-edge handsets are more than skin deep. To get a running start in the fast-changing smartphone business, Motorola embraced Google’s Android operating system instead of building one of its own. Yet that move created challenges of its own, as Motorola was then forced to adapt its handset hardware to the idiosyncracies of a third-party OS.

Tuning a piece of hardware to a piece of software is a laborious and time-consuming task, and upon close inspection, the Droid still bears some scars from the process — most likely because Motorola was in a hurry to rush the product to market. To learn about some of the ways in which this becomes most apparent, read Gregor’s column.

It’s no secret that Apps are having a profound impact on consumer electronics devices. Thanks to popular new products like Apple’s iPhone and the Google-powered G1 phone, Apps — those relatively lightweight, Internet-enabled software programs optimized to perform a specific task — have revolutionized the way we think about mobile devices by transforming them into network-enabled computing platforms that are easily customizable and almost infinitely versatile.

But what about other kinds of gadgets? How can electronic products that aren’t used as mobile communications tools take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the proliferation of Apps?

Google’s Android operating system may be part of the answer. Although originally created for use on mobile phones, Android can be adapted to bring App functionality to a wide range of devices — from portable multimedia players, to home appliances, to telecom gear. It also has many advantages: it’s open-source, powerful, supported by a robust development community, and free of charge to use. For hardware manufacturers, then, the challenge comes in figuring out how to adapt Android quickly, reliably, and affordably for use beyond the cellphone.

MOTO’s Android Media Platform (AMP) makes that possible. Created by a team of MOTO engineers, AMP is a full-featured Android reference platform that makes it faster and easier for customers to bring app- enabled products to market. Put simply, AMP is a multimedia development environment for creating Android-enabled products that enjoy full interoperability with the complete library of Android apps.

For example, with AMP, a bedside clock radio could do double-duty as a network-enabled glucose monitor for diabetics. Or a simple dashboard accessory could provide detailed information about your car’s fuel consumption and operating history.

For device manufacturers, AMP provides a powerful set of tools to compress the product design and development process and focus on creating sophisticated technical architectures and user experiences.

For MOTO, AMP is an exciting way to enable innovation by making it easier to embed new capabilities in almost any consumer electronics item. AMP is designed to accelerate the shift from a stand-alone world of “dumb” products to a new, connected universe of “smart” devices.

What other kinds of things could AMP do?  If you have ideas, we’d love to hear about them.