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.