Whether you like it or not, phones are being pushed out at a ridiculous rate, and whatever you purchase today will most likely be outdated within the year. Such is the case with the recent announcement of Motorola’s DROID 4. It’s only been six months since the DROID 3 was released and Motorola has already moved on to the next big iteration, leaving consumers to wonder why there was even a DROID 3 to begin with? To add insult to injury, Verizon has just dropped the price of the DROID 3 to $99 in preparation for the DROID 4 landing.
We caught our first glimpse of the Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX at CES with its added (but still irremovable) 3300 mAh battery. Instead of making things easy and allowing users the convenience of swapping out batteries, Motorola decided to create an entirely new version of the DROID RAZR, this time with better battery life for the power-sucking 4G LTE. Although everything besides the new battery remained the same, we weren’t given any sort of release date for the MAXX. The keen eyes over at Droid-Life noticed that Motorola wasn’t so coy, and in fact posted a release date of January 26 on their website.
One day we’ll all look back and say “Hey, remember when we used to have 3G phones?” Of course our kids won’t have any idea of what we’re talking about, in fact, they’ll probably be calling them communicators by then. It seems Verizon is set in making 4G LTE the future of their network, so much, that they have announced from here on out, 4G LTE connectivity is a “hard requirement” for any manufacturer looking to have their phone on Big Red’s network. Of course for now, they will be making a few exceptions for “dumb” phones and phone’s that work on their push-to-talk network.
If you own a 4G LTE device from Verizon then you already know all about battery drain. There are many ways to help improve your battery life on a 4G LTE device, but one of your best options, is to simply purchase an extended battery (if your device has one). It was the first thing I purchased alongside my Galaxy Nexus, and one accessory that I recommend to anyone looking for an extended battery life. Not too long ago, Verizon had the Galaxy Nexus extended battery on sale for 50% percent off, and we’re happy to report that this deal extends to all extended batteries available for Verizon’s 4G LTE devices.
Up until now, no LTE device on Verizon has been able to support global roaming (no, not global warming, global roaming), in part because of a network issues that prevents LTE phones from roaming in non-CDMA markets. But now, thanks to some network enhancements and unannounced global GSM/WCDMA roaming capability in the DROID 4 and LG Spectrum, both devices will have global roaming support enabled by the first half of the year. Here’s what Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney had to say:
