Droid Pro available for pre-order beginning Tuesday

Droid Pro, Verizon's answer to the BlackBerry, should hit store shelves on Nov. 18.

On Tuesday, Verizon Wireless will begin taking pre-orders for the Droid Pro, a Motorola-built phone that Verizon is billing as the first Droid "optimized for business use." An iPhone killer this isn't. Instead, Motorola is taking aim at BlackBerry. The Droid Pro, which ships with a full QWERTY keyboard and Quickoffice Mobile Suite, is targeted squarely at consumers with little interest in playing endless games of Angry Birds.

Among the features on the Droid Pro are the Android 2.2 mobile operating system, a 1GHz processor, a 2GB hard-drive and 512MB of memory. (Memory capacity can be expanded via an SD card slot.) As Horizons blogger Chris Gaylord recently noted, the 5-megapixel camera on the Droid Pro is "on par with Apple and the Droid 2, but a little shy of the 8-megapixel Droid X. Of course, pixel count doesn't mean much these days."

And then there's the impressive range of coverage. According to Verizon, the Droid Pro should allow users to access voice service in 220 countries, data service in more than 200 countries, and 3G data service in 120 countries. (By comparison, there are rumors that the Verizon iPhone, which seems to be pretty much a done deal, might not work abroad at all. Bummer.)

The Droid Pro will sell for $179.99 after a $100 rebate and with a two-year voice and data plan, which puts it 20 bucks under the $200 price-point that has become the norm for subsidized phones. Customers can begin pre-ordering the phone on Nov. 9; the Droid Pro hits store shelves a little over a week later, on Nov. 18. Thinking about picking up a Droid Pro? Drop us a line in the comments section below.