Motorola unveiled the Droid RAZR for Verizon today, and it’s an extremely svelte, powerful, and fast Gingerbread-powered phone. Bringing back the iconic RAZR brand popular in the early 00’s, Motorola is trying to gain back some of its former glory. Since the first revitalization of Motorola with original Droid back in November 2009, Motorola has been struggling to stay relevant by putting out popular smartphones. The extreme delay of the Droid BIONIC for Verizon signaled that Motorola had finally lost its ability to compete. Perhaps introducing a Gingerbread phone on the day Google and Samsung are announcing the Galaxy Nexus/Nexus Prime and Ice Cream Sandwich wasn’t the brightest of ideas, but the Droid RAZR actually seems pretty impressive.
Powered by a dual core 1.2 GHz TI OMAP 4460 processor and 1 GB RAM running Gingerbread on a 4.3 inch Super AMOLED Advanced qHD display and LTE, the Droid RAZR definitely meets the status quo for superphones of 2011. Motorola also slapped on an 8 megapixel camera capable of 1080p video inside a KEVLAR body only 7.1mm thin (what Motorola calls the world’s thinnest smartphone) and a screen made from Corning’s Gorilla Glass. Incredibly thin, incredibly light, as well as apparently pretty durable (we’ll see how it stands up to a blender), the Droid RAZR takes engineering to a plane similar to Apple’s with the iPhone 4S.
Motorola unveiled a host of software solutions and accessories to accompany the Droid RAZR as well. Motocast, Motorola’s new cloud solution, allows you to stream content from your computer directly to your phone, a proprietary but streamlined solution. SmartActions is another piece of software that saves battery life as much as possible, clocking down the processor, turning off WiFI and Bluetooth to get as much as possible out of the decent-sized 1800mAH battery. Also provided is enterprise-grade security software, such as Citrix Receiver, to finally push Android into the business sector. Compatibility with new 10-inch and 14-inch Lapdocks, wireless keyboards, docks, etc. Verizon is accepting pre-orders starting October 27 for $299, while it will be fully released sometime in November.
Is a Gingerbread phone, no matter how sexy and powerful, relevant in what will soon be a post-Ice Cream Sandwich world? All I can say is that I hope the upgrades to Ice Cream Sandwich will move more briskly than for Gingerbread.
[…] hard to imagine a better time for smartphone buyers. With last week’s announcements of the new RAZR and Galaxy Nexus as well as Apple’s iPhone 4S burning up sales records, you can pretty much be […]