Verizon has announced three new additions to its Droid range of smartphones, the Droid Ultra, Droid Maxx, and the Droid Mini. The presentation, held in New York, gave the impression these devices would replace the old RAZR range, as the specs were compared on numerous occasions to emphasize the enhancements made to the new Droid models.
We’ll start with the Droid Ultra, which has a 5-inch display with an unconfirmed HD resolution, that we’ll take to be 720p until we’re told otherwise. Inside is a dual-core, 1.7GHz processor and 2GB of RAM, plus 16GB of storage memory. A 10-megapixel camera sits on the back of the 7.18mm thick, Kevlar unibody chassis, plus a 2-megapixel video call cam can be found above the screen.
The Droid Maxx shares almost exactly the same spec – although it does have 32GB of memory rather than 16GB – but there is one crucial difference, the battery. Inside the Droid Ultra is a 2130mAh cell providing 28 hours of use, while the Droid Maxx has a 3500mAh battery for 48 hours use.
Each Droid phone will go on sale August 20, with the Droid Ultra priced at $200, the Droid Maxx at $300, and the Droid Mini at $100, provided you sign up for a two-year contract.
As for the Droid Mini, you won’t be at all surprised to learn it’s a bit smaller than the Ultra and the Maxx. The screen measures 4.3-inches with the same HD resolution, while the internal memory is back down to 16GB, and the battery returns to 2130mAh. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same as its sister phones. All three use Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and can connect to Verizon’s 4G LTE network, plus they all share common features such as Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, and GPS.
Motorola uses a new chip inside each new Droid, named the Motorola X8 mobile computing system. It contains eight cores; two application processor cores, four for the GPU, one for, “Contextual computing,” and the final one for natural language. This enables touchless voice control where you can wake the device and make calls, search the web or activate the navigation system, just be talking to the phone. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’re expecting something very similar on the Moto X.
Another feature we’ve heard about through Moto X rumors is Active Display, where notifications are delivered to a small section of the screen, and only briefly, to save battery life. A Quick Capture camera mode has been added, along with a new sharing system called Droid Zap. All new Droid phones will also come with Google’s Ingress game pre-installed. Ingress is a location based, scavenger hunt game which is still invitation only, but we’re guessing that’s either about to change, or Droid users will get special access.
Each Droid phone will go on sale August 20, with the Droid Ultra priced at $200, the Droid Maxx at $300, and the Droid Mini at $100, provided you sign up for a two-year contract. All three phones are available for pre-order through Verizon’s website right now.
