Motorola is on something of a roll in the lead-up to the holiday gadget shopping season and the company that invented the mobile phone decades ago continued its streak of interesting new mobile products today with the introduction of the Droid Turbo, featuring one of the biggest batteries ever put into a smartphone.
The Droid Turbo follows the unveiling of the Moto 360 smartwatch, new Moto X and Moto G and a Motorola-made Nexus 6 that have all been introduced in the past 8 weeks.
The Droid Turbo is something like a supercharged Moto X, with a 3,900 mAh battery designed to last 48 hours on a charge, a quad-core 2.7 GHz Snapdragon 805 processor, 3 GB RAM, a 5.2-in Quad HD display with an insane 565 pixels per inch and 21 megapixel camera that also shoots 4K video. Further boosting its power credentials is the optional turbo charger that adds 8 hours of use with just 15 minutes charging time.
Those are just about the best straight-up hardware specs we've seen in a smartphone so far, but there is a rather big catch: the Droid Turbo, like several other Droid models before it, is only available from Verizon, the largest wireless carrier in the United States.
To hear Motorola's own executives tell it, as I have in conversation with current Motorola Mobility President Rick Osterloh during the company's annual reveal events for the Moto X the past two years, the Droid line has always been about appealing to a more "aggressive," even masculine kind of Android user.
True to form, the Droid Turbo is available in a selection of rugged materials like "ballistic nylon" or "metalized glass fiber" laid overtop of a Kevlar shell.
The Droid Turbo also gets plenty of the software goodies from the Moto X – like the twist gesture that skips straight to the camera app, an active display that pulses on to show you the time and your notifications at a glance, as well as voice control.
The Droid Turbo will be available for US$199 on contract from Verizon starting on October 30.
Source: Motorola
I wish Google would make a flagship phone like this for wider release but the feature I think is the coolest is actually H.265 support. It uses a lot more processing to encode/decode video but it only uses about half as much bandwidth as H.264.