Droid Maxx
The Droid Maxx is a smartphone developed by Motorola Mobility. It is the first Droid to be a high-end smartphone exclusively developed by Motorola for Verizon Wireless. It is part of the Verizon Droid line and was announced on 23 July 2013, along with the Droid Ultra and Droid Mini, at a joint Motorola and Verizon Wireless press conference.
The Droid Maxx maintains a similar design to its predecessor, the Droid Razr HD, including the DuPont Kevlar unibody. It included Motorola's proprietary X8 Mobile Computing System, which consists of 8 cores: 2-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro applications processor, 4-core Adreno 320 graphics processor, 1 low-power core for natural language processing, and 1 low-power core for contextual awareness processing to enable the new Touchless control feature. The internal battery was increased in size to 3,500 mAh. The on-screen buttons for back, home, and multitasking functions were moved to off-screen capacitive soft keys below the screen. The Droid Maxx also includes Motorola's Active Notification feature.
The reception of the device was mostly positive, with the caveat that it is only available on the US carrier, Verizon Wireless. Some reviewing outlets called the device "the best Android device available on Verizon Wireless". Many others praised Motorola's Active Notification system, which turns on a portion of the AMOLED screen to "blink" notifications to the user rather than a traditional LED notification light. The soft-touch Kevlar unibody, as well as the overall physical design, was praised. Reviewers were mixed to the device's continued use of a 720p HD resolution at a 5 in screen size, though complimented the AMOLED display's brightness, deep blacks, and its benefits to battery conservation.
Features
Operating system and software
The Droid Maxx runs a mostly stock version of Google's Android mobile operating system, initially shipping with the version Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Jellybean 4.2 included various accessibility improvements, new lock-screen features with quick access to the camera, support for wireless display, and a new built-in clock application with world clock, stopwatch, and timer. Motorola and Verizon released an update to Android 4.4 KitKat on 19 December 2013, and an additional update to Android 4.4.4 on 15 July 2014. KitKat brought restyled navigation bars, "immersive" full-screen mode, stronger security, power management and some other minor improvements. Motorola also enhanced its proprietary camera software for better color, exposure, and dynamic range accuracy, and included the updated Google Hangouts application, which included SMS/MMS messaging functionality. Finally, support for the Square credit card reader was added. The KitKat 4.4.4 update brought further improvements to camera functionality, improved Bluetooth connectivity, and added Isis Mobile Wallet.The smartphone can share its internet connection over WiFi. It can access the Google Play Store, an online distribution platform for the Android OS managed by Google. Users may purchase and download applications developed with the Android SDK, as well as music, movies, television shows, books, and magazine subscriptions. The Droid Maxx, like its Moto X sibling, showcases the Google Now function via Touchless Control, by speaking the hot phrase "Ok Google Now", the device will launch a voice assistant that taps into Google Now to control the phone and run natural language queries with the Google search engine, without requiring physical input from the user. This function uses the natural language processor in the X8 system. Active Notifications displays relevant notifications to the user while the phone is face-up. The minimalist notifications show on the lock screen as white icons against a black background; power is conserved by not turning on pixels that would display the black background. Furthermore, using the Contextual Awareness processor in the X8 system and a proximity sensor, the Droid Maxx "knows" when it is face-down or in a pocket and will not display Active Notifications.