Gadgetory

hi this is Brian Bennett for cnet.com and right now we're taking a first look at the motorola droid ultra the ultra sits smack dab in the middle of motorola's new droid smartphone lineup on verizon available starting august 20th for 1 99 99 the ultra is the thinnest droid smartphone ever less than a third of an inch in fact yet manages to pack a large 5-inch screen 4G LTE data Android jelly bean plus a lot of slick tricks made possible by Google Motorola's new master highlights include a massive 5-inch 720p OLED screen that has bright colors and deep blacks it has an attractive edge to edge design and is framed by a 2 megapixel front camera below the display are three capacitive buttons for Android functions the only physical buttons are a volume rocker and power key on the phones right side a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack sits up top while a micro USB port is placed on the bottom edge on back is the main 10 megapixel camera with LED flash also here is a large speaker that actually gets really loud before you use this phone though I suggest you clean your hands that's because both the smooth back surface and screen of the ultra pick up fingerprints and grease smears easily Motorola says the droid ultra is built using a Kevlar unibody construction for greater protection against drops and spills that's a good thing since the handset does feel pretty slippery powering the droid ultra android software is Motorola's new x8 mobile computing system the same setup on the Moto X despite being based on a dual-core CPU the ultra feels quick and responsive it also has discrete quad-core Adreno graphics plus a processor for interpreting natural language and one for contextual computing all that hardware helps the droid ultra do tricks like listen out for your verbal commands and conduct advanced Google searches and hands-free navigation the camera app is easy to use too featuring a simplified interface while offering handy modes such as HDR and panorama you can even twist the phone twice in your wrist to wake the ultra up and directly to the camera the droid ultra however does have a few pain points first it only comes with 16 gigabytes of on-board storage and lacks an SD card slot to add more its battery is also embedded and not user removable verizon loads the device up to with its standard selection of junky blue air I'm Brian Bennett for cnet.com and this has been a first look at the motorola droid ultra