How do you know this? Is it on the Motorola site or something?
I've got some experience with hardware design as well as photography - this is just how things get built. The Motorola Droid X has an 8MP camera, there's only one sensor and one lens. The lens (or sensor) is adjustable in that it's autofocus, but there is no zoom function. The "zoom" is a digital zoom, which essentially is a crop of the image in the camera software - you can check the resolution of a picture with no zoom and with full zoom to confirm. The way this typically gets implemented is that the sensor produces a full 8MP image and then software or firmware in the phone crops the image before it's saved. Good systems do this with the raw data, others convert to JPG first. With a camera phone there's no real difference in the quality so either method is acceptable.
The Widescreen mode is just a specialized version of a digital zoom. It doesn't reduce the SIZE of the pixels (which can determine sharpness*) but just the number it saves. It's possible that the camera actually turns off recording data from the top and bottom of the sensor, but this is horribly complex and there's an extremely high probability that they just take an 8MP image and trim off the top and bottom just like their digital zoom function. Either way, it's the same lens, same sensor and same pixels - therefore the same sharpness.
You can think of it this way. Cut a square out of a piece of paper about 4" square. Now pull up a picture on your monitor and notice how sharp it is. Put the paper over your monitor so you can now only see a 4" square. Is the picture any more or less sharp because of this? That's all a crop does, trims off the edges.
* It's true that you can get a sharper image from a higher resolution sensor, but this is actually hard to do.
First you need to get optics that match, camera phone sensors generally outperform their optics in good light so you actually probably get the same sharpness from a 5MP image as you do an 8MP image.
Once you've got good optics, you need to worry about sensor noise. Under adverse lighting the smaller the pixels are the more noise you introduce and the less "sharp" the image becomes. On the other side, the larger your photosites are the less sharp the image becomes. You need to find a happy medium by ensuring you've got a decent photosite size and a decent number of pixels. An alternative is a larger sensor, which is what DSLR cameras have. This allows the same number of pixels to have a higher quality image.
Finally, you need to consider what you're looking at. If you're looking at your 8MP image on your phone you've only got about 0.4MP you're viewing. If you look at it on your monitor, that's probably 1.3MP or so (depending on your monitor). The extra sharpness you get from an 8MP image is useless, in fact because of scaling algorithms you may find that a 1.3MP image on a 1.3MP screen is a more sharp image. Pixels only count when you blow things up on your monitor (in which case you're no longer looking at a picture) or when you're printing larger than a sheet of paper. The Droid X resolution can easily be printed at 12"x20" with a decent quality without scaling. Once you start printing larger than that you'll need to do some work to upconvert the resolution, but realistically the lens and sensor quality is your enemy instead of the resolution at this point. A pro-grade ancient Nikon D2H can print passable images at poster sizes (24"x36") with only 4MP - but those pixels are high quality, have great glass in front of them, and trained photographers.
If you want more details, Google Megapixel Myth and you'll get a wealth of information.
) on your computer.
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