The Droid X, Motorola’s follow-up to the original Motorola Droid, lands on shelves today. The new phone is available online and in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement.

The Droid X features a 4.3-inch touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera, HDMI output, 3G Mobile hot spot capabilities and comes standard with 8 GB of memory expandable up to 32GB via microSDHC card. The Droid X runs Android 2.1 (Eclaire), but will receive an OTA update to Android version 2.2 (Froyo) later this summer.

An update supporting Flash 10.1 also will be delivered OTA in the near future.

Customers can take advantage of the 4.3-inch high-resolution screen on Droid X for viewing the latest movies from Blockbuster On Demand presented by V Cast Video.

Customers who choose to add the optional 3G Mobile HotSpot service to their Droid X will pay $20 per month for the service. The 32GB SanDisk microSDHC card is available for $99.99 when purchased along with the new Droid X or for $149.99 when purchased separately.

Verizon is allowing customers who have contracts ending by Dec. 31, 2010, to upgrade to Droid X without penalty.

The Droid X enters the summer smartphone fray with strong competition from other OEMs, most notably the HTC Evo 4G from Sprint, Apple’s iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S devices from Samsung.

Embarq said today it will end its wireless reseller agreement with Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel next year, becoming the second phone company following Qwest, to terminate its alliance in recent weeks. Embarq was essentially an MVNO that allowed it to sell an Embarq-branded service on Sprint’s network, but sales fell short of expectations, according to the WSJ. Embarq entered the resale agreement after it was spun off from Sprint in 2006. Gene Betts, Embarq’s CFO said at an analyst conference today Embarq ended last year with only about 112,000 wireless customers—far below its expectations of signing more than one million wireless subscribers. Embarq will support existing customers until sometime in 2009, when it may transition them to another carrier. Meanwhile, the company is exploring ways of tying its landline service to wireless offerings regardless of the carrier.

Qwest announced earlier this month that it was ditching its arrangement with Sprint in favor of a five-year agreement with Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) starting this summer.

AT&T (NYSE: T) sounded defensive about the speed of its network during a presentation to Wall Street analysts this morning. Currently, AT&T offers DSL-like speeds where it has HSDPA deployed, but AT&T’s Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said at a Morgan Stanley event today that by next year, it will start delivering speeds up to 20 mbps, and by 2010, they will surge to an impressive 100 mbps. Without saying it, I’m sure AT&T wanted us to point out that it will have a much faster network than the one being proposed by the high-profile Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel and Clearwire joint venture that dominated the headlines last week. The yet-to-be approved Clearwire-Sprint JV, backed by Intel (NSDQ: INTC), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and a handful of cable operators, expects to deliver around 6 mbps to 140 million people by the end of 2010.

De la Vega’s comments were likely a reaction to Clearwire and Sprint’s claims that they will be the first to roll out 4G in the U.S., and will be two years ahead of the competition. AT&T, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and T-Mobile have all chosen to use LTE, a technology that hasn’t even been standardized yet. But AT&T is essentially arguing that it doesn’t matter—through simple software upgrades, it can have much faster speeds than Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR). “It’s clear to us, we are in the early stages of the wireless data revolution, and there are significant opportunities ahead as we ramp up,” de la Vega said. “Through interim steps, we can deliver more speeds everyday. It’s a promising time for the business, and we have a strong record of executing, and we have a strong spectrum position that gives us a great foundation for delivering…We are in a new age—as I call it, a great age—of wireless. It is just ahead of us and we are positioned to lead.”