Hands-On: Motorola Droid Mini, Ultra, & Maxx For Verizon

This afternoon, Motorola and Verizon got together for an intimate press event to unveil the 2013 family of Droids.  Motorola took a slightly different approach and didn’t get too predictable with them as they coupled in some surprises in regard to the features department.  On the design side of things,  the look is more streamlined and thinner than previous Droids.  My notes our first impression lie below.

The Droid Ultra is one of the thinnest 5inch Droid ever made at 7.1mm w/ the Droid Maxx being just a bit thicker due tot he massive battery tucked away.  The 5inch screen uses an OLED display at 720p HD resolution.  This sounds bad on paper but I watched the Man Of Steel trailer on there and it offered brilliant colors, great blacks, & sharp resolution. Not sure if it was due to the hardware or glitches within the demos, but audio on Maxx was louder than its brethren.   The only true differences between the Ultra and Maxx are the storage and battery sizes as the Maxx is the bigger of the two.

• Moto’s new Touchless Control works as advertised, even inside of a noisy room w/ folks chatting away, it was still able to search, set reminders and other things that is within the power of Google Now. You simply say, “Ok, Google Now”, to activate it.  
• The combination of Motorola’s new 8-core X8 Mobile CPU and minimal UI additions to stock Android make the new Droid family performance quick and fast.  
• Quick Camera Capture is responsive and works better than Samsung’s eye-tracking gimmicks.  It gives you scaling up vibration to let you know it is ready after twisting your wrist twice. 

• The 10MP Clear Pixel camera is said to handle low-light better than before.  The few pics taken did show a huge improvement to Moto’s previous camera lens choice which were terrible.  More testing will come when review units become available.  
• Droid Zap is a nifty, proprietary feature that allows you share media to other members of the new Droid family by swiping up and the photo/video waits in the cloud for another user to catch it by swiping down.  You can share them publicly or privately.  Works good and I prefer to use it over Sammy’s Group Play.  
• There’s anew feature called Motorola Connect that allows you to access your Droid’s messages, emails, & phone calls by connecting to Google via built-in Chrome extension.  
• The Circle Widgets Droid Command Center is more or less the same other than the option to quickly access Droid Zap and a new Miracast feature that allows you to share media device to your HDTV using no wires.  if your TV doesn’t support it, you can buy a spare dongle to get it going.  
• BTW, the SIM cards come pre-loaded as it lays hidden under the volume rocker.

I am definitely glad that the new Google-owned Motorola decided not to just refresh the specs and make some forward-thinking additions to the Droid lineup.

It will be interesting to see if there is any new features left to show at next week’s Moto X event.  Time will tell.