Motorola’s New Droid Razrs: Bigger Displays, Improved Battery Life

Today, at a press event at Gotham Hall in New York City, Motorola Mobility unveiled its next Droid Razr smartphones, called the Droid Razr HD, the Droid Razr Maxx HD and the Droid Razr M. All will be available from Verizon Wireless.

The Droid Razr HD has a 4.7-inch touchscreen, larger than the screen on last year’s Droid Razr, with a higher-resolution display. Motorola is also claiming that the new Razr has better battery life than last year’s phone, with double the talk time and 85 percent more color saturation than the iPhone 4S. It has a dual-core processor, and comes with a Chrome browser preinstalled.

The Droid Razr Maxx has similar specs, but claims up to 21 hours of talk time and streams up to 10 hours of video over 4G LTE. Meanwhile, the Droid Razr M is a compact phone with a 4.3 inch high-resolution display with almost no borders. Despite its small size, it comes with a 2,000-milliamp battery.

All of the devices shown today are launching with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, with upgrades to Jelly Bean 4.1 becoming available for other devices by the end of the year. They each also have a rear eight-megapixel camera, mobile hotspot capabilities and a microSD expansion slot.

The Droid Razr HD and Razr Maxx HD will be available in stores “before the holidays,” Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside said. The Droid Razr M is available for preorder today from Verizon, and will cost $99.

Woodside said the company has been placing its bets in four main areas: Speed, power management, Android and open-sourced platforms.

“We believe that faster is fundamentally better,” he said, adding that a third of U.S. consumers accessing 4G LTE are using Motorola devices. “People love speed, and they love 4G LTE.”

He even took a small jab at Apple — pointing out that Motorola devices come with YouTube and Google Maps apps.

The Motorola event was kicked off by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who introduced Motorola’s Woodside.

Before handing over the spotlight, Schmidt said there are now 1.3 million Android device activations per day, with Android’s total install base at close to 500 million. “That puts us in the No. 1 position, from a platform position, in the world, by far,” Schmidt said.

Still, “we have to be competitive, and we have to be state of the art,” he continued, with that need driving Google’s acquisition of Motorola earlier this year.

The new Droid Razr HD marks the first major product announcement since Motorola was bought by Google for $12.4 billion in May, with Google attributing $5.5 billion of that amount to “patents and developed technology.”

In August, Google said it would cut 4,000 Motorola Mobility jobs, about 20 percent of the company’s workforce. Last week it was reported that Google has been looking to sell off Motorola’s set-top box and cable-modem business.