QWERTY keyboard fans, rejoice!
The Motorola Droid 4, with its trademark slide-out keyboard, has gotten an official price and release date. The Droid 4 will be released on Friday, February 10, for $199 with a two-year Verizon contract.
Verizon has confirmed the price and release date of the newest Droid phone in a press release, touting the Droid 4 as "the thinnest and most powerful 4G QWERTY smartphone measuring at less than half an inch thin."
Among the other tech specs of note: a dual-core 1.2 gHZ processor; a 4.0-inch display screen; an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera; and Android 2.3.5 "Gingerbread" (no timeframe yet for Ice Cream Sandwich, though Motorola has stated before that it is "planning on upgrading as many of [its] phones as possible."
The real star of the Droid 4, and its single defining feature, however, is that slide-out keyboard, a five-row QWERTY keyboard with edge-lit keys.
The Droid series was first promoted as an iPhone alternative in 2009, positioning itself as a better phone for texting and productivity than Apple's keyboard-less offering; Kevin Fitchard of GigaOM notes that this incarnation of the Droid is the first to support 4G LTE.
With its launch on February 10th, the Droid 4 will join another recent high-profile release from Motorola: The update to the Droid RAZR, the Droid RAZR Maxx, whose apparently incredible battery life has garnered rave reviews since the device debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.
The Droid 4 will be available on Verizon in stores on Friday, February 10; Cnet notes that this coincides with a Verizon promotion that doubles the amount of data one gets for $30/month, from 2GB per month to 4GB per month. That promotion will be available to both new customers and existing customers signing new two-year contracts -- perhaps, Motorola and Verizon hope, those picking up a new Droid 4.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article listed an 8 megapixel front-facing camera and a 1.3 megapixel rear-facing camera. The Droid 4, in fact, has an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera and 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera.
The Droid 4 made quite a splash at the recent Consumer Electronics Show, but it wasn't the only smartphone that got people buzzing. Take a look at the slideshow (below) to see the phones that stole the limelight at CES 2012.
