Despite the Droid 3 by Motorola being released just last July, the Droid 4 has already made an appearance at CES to take its place.
The most immediate improvement over its predecessor is the inclusion of 4G LTE network support on Verizon USA. Droid 4 still sports a 4 inch QVGA display which presumably still maintains the less popular pentile sub-pixel arrangement found on the Droid 3 and most AMOLED displays. Increased from the Droid 3′s 1GHz dual-core processor, the new handset will feature a 1.2 GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor. Additionally, the Droid 4 will double the available RAM of the Droid 3 from 512MB to 1GB. There is an 8MP camera on the rear of the phone capable of recording video in 1080 and 16 GB of built-in storage, similar to that of its predecessor.
The slide out QWERTY keyboard is, of course, the Droid’s claim to fame and has been improved upon in every revision since its introduction in 2009. The Droid 4 has a slightly improved design in the backlighting functionality. The keys are edge-lit rather than simply back lit. So, instead of the letter on the key being illuminated only, the entire key’s boarder is illuminated to aid in low-light typing. Another notable feature not found in previous Droid models is the ability to dock to a webtop laptop like the Motorola Atrix.
The Droid 4 will ship running Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and say that an upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is inevitable. Motorola have not supplied a solid release date, but say the new handset should be available in the coming weeks.
