New Telephone Day: Motorola Edition ⇥ bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Both Motorola and Nokia introduced a plethora of new phones today. I guess it’s important to get these things in before next week’s big Apple event.

Brian X. Chen writes for the New York Times‘ Bits blog:

After being quiet for nearly a year, Motorola Mobility, recently acquired by Google, is making its return to the mobile market with three new smartphones.

At a press conference in New York on Wednesday, the company introduced three smartphones under its famous Razr brand that will become available for Verizon customers. It said the focus of these phones was speed, because they could connect to Verizon’s faster fourth-generation network. And they have larger screens than their primary rival, the Apple iPhone.

That’s right: three new phones, all called the Droid RAZR-something: the Droid RAZR M, the Droid RAZR HD, and the Droid RAZR Maxx HD¹. That seems like a confusing amount of choice, but it appears to be the “good-better-best” model spread across three names.

Now that Motorola is part of Google, there are some improvements on the software side. There are new “developer editions“, which allow modifications to Android (wasn’t it already “open”?), and “most” devices released in the past year will receive the latest incremental Android update. If Motorola can’t be bothered to ship an update, they’ll give you a hundred bucks towards a new phone.

Despite the closer alignment with Google, however, Android is still skinned on these new phones. It’s less thorough than TouchWiz, but it’s surprising that the Google-owned company isn’t going to ship the stock Google OS. Don’t tell me that you’ll be surprised if the next “Nexus” phone is made by Motorola, though.