CES Day One Recap: Smartphones Come Out Strong

Day one of CES 2012 sure kicked off to a great start, especially with a bevy of new smartphones announced. Many of the major original equipment manufacturers, even Nokia, have come out with big announcements, though some of them seem a bit odd. Nevertheless, here is a breakdown of some of the more important announcements made on day one.

Motorola
Instead of announcing new phones preloaded with some tasty Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) Motorola came out with two heavily rumored devices for Verizon Wireless, the DROID 4 and the DROID RAZR MAXX.

In typical Motorola fashion, the DROID 4 continues the robotic legacy running Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard at a svelte .5 inch thickness. The Droid 4 also comes equipped with a 4-inch qHD LCD and 1.2 GHz OMAP chip. 1 GB of RAM rounds out the boxy picture.

The DROID RAZR MAXX, in its overly capitalized glory, thickens out more than its predecessor at 8.9mm, but packs in a huge 3300 mAh and a larger included microSD card of the 32 GB variety.

Samsung
Possibly the most active company in terms of announcing new devices, Samsung kicked off the first day of CES with a bang, including the Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD, Samsung Galaxy Note LTE, and a Galaxy Nexus for Sprint.

With a name almost as long-winded as the Sprint variant of Samsung’s current premier smartphone (Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch), the Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD packs in the same display as the Galaxy Nexus to give AT&T its third edition of this smartphone.

The formula to create Samsung’s Galaxy Note LTE is simple: take the hugenormous 5.3 inch Galaxy Note, change the buttons to the standard 4 button capacitive layout, and add LTE for AT&T’s blazing fast network. What could go wrong? Smaller-handed geeks beware.

The Galaxy Nexus for Sprint is the same as Verizon, but it’s made for when Sprint cranks out their shiny new LTE network. Toss in Google Wallet (which Verizon decided to block) and you have the current king on a cheaper network.

HTC
Now named the HTC Titan II, the popular 4.7 inch HTC Titan on AT&T gains LTE and a crazy 16 megapixel camera. Could this be the Windows Phone 7 at its height?