Verizon Announces New Lineup of Droid Phones: Droid Mini, Droid Ultra, and Droid Maxx

This morning, cell phone provider Verizon hosted a small, low-key event in which a new line of Droid phones were announced and detailed. This is coupled with Verizon’s plan to reboot their Droid smartphone line and “challenge everything again” next month.

According to them, it’s time to bring in the next generation of Droid. We’ll let you be the judge.

Verizon announced three new smartphones this morning, all under the refreshed Droid model umbrella: the Droid Mini, the Droid Ultra, and the Droid Maxx. Each phone is unique in its own right, embodying features that are useful for its own particular brand of user.

The Droid Maxx is a $299 phone for power users – it has an impressive advertised battery life of 48 hours. It comes in at 8.5mm thin, and is composed of a unibody and Gorilla Glass exterior. The former Maxx measured 9.3mm thin, and had a less gargantuan (but still pretty impressive) 32 hour battery life.

The Droid Ultra comes in at $199, and is a step down from the Maxx, but one above the Mini. It’s all about being the thinnest smartphone available (and it certainly is), and one that, no less, comes with a red Kevlar back plate and a 10 megapixel camera that shoots 1080p video with a f2.4 lens.

The Droid Mini is up to bat for a reasonable $99, and claims to have all the power of the Ultra, but in a smaller, more pocketable form factor.

All three phones have a 24% faster CPU (processor), a whopping 100% faster GPU (video processing), and twice the RAM. All of this combines to form the “Motorola X8 mobile computing system,” a new 8-core chipset with 2 application cores, 4 cores dedicated to graphics, one for contextual computing, and another for natural language processing.

All the phones feature touchless control, allowing you to perform the regular functions of your phone without the use of your eyes or hands. Also known as, you know, voice control. Another great feature included in the new Droids is the ability to take photos instantly, as well as share them locally with other nearby phones using “Droid Zap.”

The new Droid smartphone lineup will arrive on August 20, 2013, and the entire pack is available for pre-order today through Verizon. And if you purchase a device prior to September 30, you get an entire six months of free access to Google Music All Access.

Not a bad bonus. Not bad at all.