Gadgetory

well this is Dan with the verge and we're looking at the Motorola Droid Razr HD and max HD which are now available from Verizon Wireless the new phones look really familiar they're very similar and parents the last year's razor and razor max right down to their sharp rectangular corners and excessive border around the new 720p display as you can see the razor HD in the max are really similar to each other the max is slightly heavier and even more slightly thicker but it still provides a 33% larger battery and double the internal storage of the standard razor HD over all the hardware is slightly less impressive than last year's razors the general shape of the phone doesn't mask its large size as well as phones from HTC and Samsung do which makes a razor HD feel noticeably larger than the competition and the angular edges and abundance of Kevlar on the back of the phone aren't very attractive but what is new and improved here is the display which has been upgraded from an unimpressive 4.3 inch qHD Super AMOLED unit to a new 4.7 inch 720p HD Super AMOLED screen the new display is much sharper than before it's really bright and it has great viewing angles but once you dig a bit deeper into it the cracks start to show like other Motorola displays the razor HD screen is extremely saturated and it also carries a very bluish cast which makes whites look really inaccurate software-wise the razor HD is unfortunately launching with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich though both Motorola and Verizon have promised that an upgrade to 4.1 jelly bean will be available before the end of this year the razor HD features the same minimal modifications to Ice Cream Sandwich that we saw on the razor M and they are pretty much limited to new icons a modified launcher with quick settings available to the left of the home screen and a revised lockscreen with shortcuts for camera phone and messages inside the razor HD we find a dual-core 1.5 gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon s4 processor and it performs just as well here as we've seen in other smartphones for the most part day to day activities are fast and responsive apps open quickly and switching between them is very easy and it has no trouble running even 3d games but at the end of the day the razor HD and razor HD max don't really bring anything new to the table that we haven't seen from other Android manufacturers already if Motorola's design is your cup of tea we strongly recommend just going with a max version since it provides significantly longer battery life than the regular model without a huge difference in size or weight you can pick up the razor HD from Verizon Wireless right now for $1.99 on contract and you can also get the razor max HD for $2.99 on contract of course with Google expected to announce a number of new and ex smartphones in the very near future it might be best to just wait a few weeks if you possibly can