Motorola announces new battery-packed Droid RAZR HD, RAZR Maxx HD, and RAZR M

Today Motorola unveiled a new three-member RAZR family, featuring the Droid RAZR HD, Maxx HD, and RAZR M, in New York City.

Motorola announced three new smartphones at Gotham Hall in New York City. Part of its brand new Droid collection, the RAZR HD, Maxx HD, and RAZR M focus on edge-to-edge displays and insane battery life. 

Called “On Display”, Motorola’s conference kicked off with a band singing about America to a crowd of reporters who look like they’d rather not be forced into some mediocre concert. Once that bit of awkwardness ended, Eric Schmidt took the stage to talk up Motorola’s sales numbers for a while. Then there was more talking, mostly revolving around Motorola’s new focus on unprecedented battery life. 

After more talking, and a couple jabs at Apple and Samsung, the newest Motorola smartphones were finally unveiled. Three to be exact, all part of Motorola’s new and improved RAZR family.

The higher-end devices in the line up are called the Droid RAZR HD and Droid RAZR Maxx HD. The RAZR HD is packing a 4.7-inch edge-to-edge display, Gorilla Glass, dual-core processor, and supports 4G LTE (obviously). Motorola also claims the screen boasts 78% more pixels and 85% more color saturation than the iPhone 4S. In benchmark tests, the new device can browse the web using Chrome up to 40% faster than Safari on the iPhone. Motorola really seems to be after Apple, there have been a lot of comparisons.

For some reason Motorola tried to show off this browsing speed using the Wi-Fi in the building, rather than Verizon’s wireless network so browsing speed was not impressive in the demo. The RAZR HD is NFC-enabled and Verizon has given up on blocking Google Wallet. The real star here, however, is the outstanding battery life. Apparently the RAZR HD can handle up to 16 hours of talk time, basically unheard of in the smartphone world.

The Droid RAZR Maxx HD appears to be running the same specs as the RAZR HD, but with the a maxxed out battery (sorry, couldn’t help it) taken from the RAZR Maxx. Meaning that you’re looking at around 21 hours of talk time and enough juice to watch an entire season of 30 Rock.

The mid-range Droid RAZR M rounds out the family dynamic, satisfying the needs of more casual users. The RAZR M has a nearly edgeless, 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display (using Gorilla Glass), 4G LTE support, 8GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, dual-core processor, and an 8-megapixel camera in the back. Even at that size, however, it manages to squeeze in 40% more screen real estate than the iPhone 4S. The battery can handle up to 20 hours of music streaming, so there clearly won’t be a huge sacrifice in battery when moving from the RAZR HD to the RAZR M. 

But here’s an interesting twist of events. Despite being owned by Google, Motorola’s latest line up will not ship with Jelly Bean. Instead they will be updated from Ice Cream Sandwich to Android’s latest OS — which was released two months ago — before the end of the year.

Pre-orders for the RAZR M start today at 5pm EDT (New York time). It will retail for $100, presumably on contract, and is eligible for the share everything plan. The RAZR HD and Maxx HD will be available sometime before the holidays.

Our own Natt Garun is in attendance, providing us with the collection of  with the RAZR HD and RAZR Maxx HD below. She will be sharing her own hands-on impressions shortly.