Motorola RAZR Maxx HD preview

We’ve just covered the Motorola launch event live on Ubergizmo, but now we’ve had some “hands-on” time with all three phones, including the Motorola RAZR Maxx HD, which will be the most exciting of all for the “enthusiast” category of users. Why? Simply because it’s an even better version of the previous RAZR Maxx but it keeps the 3300mAh battery which is the most important family trait of all.

We know that the RAZR Maxx HD will have a stellar battery life, but when we got our hands on it, we realized that it looks a lot better in reality than it did on the big screen during the presentation (it’s usually the other way around…). Motorola has used quality materials, and it shows. The mix of aluminum and Kevlar provides a very solid chassis that is absolutely rigid. Between the Gorilla glass on the front and the wrap-around Kevlar back, it is fair to assume that this phone is practically scratch-proof, but we’ll see what happens during our full review.

The display is very nice, and the thin bezel does a good job at keeping the overall form factor small and nice (I prefer using this term than “frameless”, this is not frameless). At 4.7″, this is quite a lot of screen real estate for a relatively compact phone. Motorola did a good job on this one, and you can be sure that thin bezels are going to be the next “thing” in 2013.

Internally, the Motorola RAZR Maxx HD is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (what a clean sweep for Qualcomm in 2012!), so you can expect levels of performance to be similar to other top phones using the same platform (GS3 AT&T etc…). One more thing: the RAZR Maxx HD and HD don’t have a microSD slot, so it’s 32GB, and that’s it. Pretty good, still.

As it stands, we don’t have the final pricing and availability for the RAZR Maxx HD, but I’ve been told “q4” and that it would ship with Android 4.0.x (ICS) and will be upgraded to Jelly Bean (4.1) in 2012… Frankly, I’m not sure what the price difference is going to be with the RAZR HD, but I don’t see a reason for not choosing the 3300mAh battery (even Motorola employees can’t tell which is the HD and which is the Maxx HD). I suspect that a $100 price difference is what you should expect. Let’s wait and see.

What do you think? This seems to be the answer to all the battery problems that heavy users complain about. Drop a comment and tell us.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Breaking, Cellphones
Tags: droid, Hands-On, Motorola, RAZR Maxx, Verizon