CES 2012: DROID 4 And DROID RAZR Maxx

One of the best parts of attending the Consumer Electronics Show is getting to play with brand new, just announced phones like the DROID 4 and the DROID RAZR Maxx from Motorola for Verizon. Unfortunately, you get to play with them much the way you get to play with a cell phone at a store — only superficially, for a few minutes, and tethered to a base with a security device. That said, I took both phones for a test run and came away with impressive results.

The RAZR Maxx is probably the big highlight, as Motorola is saying it has the battery life equivalent of hooking your phone up to a car battery, with almost a full day of talk time. Not standby time, but actual time spent on the phone. It feels almost like a misnomer to call it a RAZR, as it is by no means as thin as the original device. It looks something like the original, except while the original had that little hump at the top, this version is all hump. It gives the phone significantly more heft, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it doesn’t have the unbalanced qualities I felt hampered the previous version. The phone was running Blur on top of Android 2.3.5, as opposed to Android 4.0, so it was a little difficult to judge how the phone would work out performance-wise in the end.

The DROID 4 feels something like the original DROID RAZR as well, if the section under the hump was filled in with a physical keyboard. It’s a little smaller, more in line with the other DROID screen sizes. The slider is smooth, and the keyboard has  nice press feel and responsiveness to it. Much like the Maxx, DROID 4 was not running Android 4.0, so your guess as to how the phone will look on-screen is as good as mine.

I had enough playtime with both the DROID 4 and the DROID RAZR Maxx to get the sense that if you are in the market for a new phone, these are serious objects of desire.