AT&T Mobility is rolling out the much-anticipated Motorola Moto X phone and Verizon Wireless is busy launching three new Motorola Droid smartphones, even as pictures of what looks like a “Droid 5” are leaking in China.
The Moto X is $200 on contract, and AT&T says the phone has “limited 4G LTE availality in select markets.” Customers can choose the look of their phone’s front, back, accents and wallpaper before it ships. The Moto X is the first smartphone to be manufactured in the United States.
The Motorola phones hitting Verizon Wireless stores are the Droid Maxx, the Droid Ultra and the Droid Mini. The Maxx and the Ultra both have 5-inch displays, huge by most people’s standards, but small compared to the super-sized Samsung Mega that is also hitting stores this month. The Droid Mini has a 4.3-inch screen, so even though it is called a “mini” it is still bigger than the current iPhone 5, which sports a 4-inch screen.
Meanwhile Asian manufacturers are apparently hard at work on the next Droid, and if pictures that leaked this weekend are accurate the new Droid will include a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The newest Droid appears to be smaller than the Maxx and the Ultra, perhaps closer in screen size to the Droid Mini. Like the Mini, it appears to support wireless charging.
The inclusion of a slide-out keyboard may seem like a blast from the past; the original Droid smartphone included one in 2009. Motorola revived the feature in 2012 with the Droid 4, and clearly the Google hardware unit thinks there are still plenty of Android users (or potential converts) who would like to use a keyboard. Reportedly sluggish sales of BlackBerry’s Q10 smartphone notwithstanding, Google may believe that the availability of the Android ecosystem on a keyboard-equipped phone remains compelling.
