In a smartphone market where companies breathlessly try to outpace one another in screen size, clock speeds and pixel density, kudos to Motorola for focusing on battery life instead.
Motorola’s Droid Razr MAXX for Verizon Wireless is a modification of the original Droid Razr, which launched late last year. In exchange for a thickness of about 0.35 inches–that’s 0.075 inches more than the Razr–the Razr MAXX provides 21 hours of talk time on a single charge thanks to a 3,300 mAh battery. Other specs are unchanged, and include a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, a 4.3-inch display with 960-by-540 resolution, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 1080p front-facing camera and 32 GB of storage. The phone runs Android 2.3, but will get an upgrade to Android 4.0.
(PHOTOS: Day Two of the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show)
Smartphone battery life is an issue dear to my heart. It bothers me that today’s smartphones can’t last through the day unless you carefully monitor screen brightness and background updates while keeping your usage in check. It’s about time smartphone makers started taking this seriously.
Verizon’s 4G LTE network is still a major battery drain, but the MAXX does its best to withstand the impact. Jeff Hadden, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Motorola, said the phone can stream over six hours of video with LTE enabled, which is twice the duration of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. On Verizon’s 3G network, the MAXX nearly doubles the streaming time of Apple’s iPhone 4S, Hadden said. The phone can reportedly play two and a half days of music while in airplane mode, and could survive a round trip between Las Vegas and Los Angeles with GPS navigation throughout. I’d love to test this in the real world to see how well Motorola’s claims hold up.
The Droid Razr MAXX will be available in “the coming weeks” on Verizon Wireless for $299 with a two-year contract.
(MORE: AT&T’s 4G LTE Lineup: Six Android Devices and Two Windows Phones)