Even though the Motorola Droid Mini 4G Android smartphone is the smallest of the three that Motorola Mobility debuted back in July, it was the last to actually arrive in the mobile marketplace in the United States. The handset runs on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE system in the US, and retails for around $49 on contract at select online retailers. You may know that the Motorola Droid Ultra and Droid Maxx also accompanied the Mini as recent smartphones offered by that company, and all three of these handsets run on the Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System.
The Motorola Droid Mini can be purchased at a reduced price starting at $49.99, saving you up to $50 over carrier prices.
Motorola refers to a “system” rather than a CPU or chip set, because the optimization and customization of the hardware package is unique. While the handset does employ an octa-core setup, we are not referring to an eight core central processor. The CPU is basically a dual core Snapdragon S4 Pro clocked at 1.7 GHz, but Motorola has tweaked its firmware and customized the chip. They then also included a contextual computing processor and natural language processor, as well as a quad core graphics processing unit.
What is unique is that Motorola has spread several low-power tasks and standard operations to the stand-alone cores and GPU, allowing the central processor on the Motorola Droid Mini to focus on your more important requests and tasks. The contextual computing processor handles sensors, display and touch interaction, but it also acts as the main processor when your Mini is in standby mode. The natural language processor busies itself with audio, noise estimation and noise cancellation, and also provides an “always on” experience when working in tandem with the stand-alone contextual computing processor.
Motorola calls this experience a “touchless control” mode, as it allows you to wake up your phone with voice commands even when it is sleeping or in standby mode. The phone also conserves battery power through its “active display” notification feature. This only illuminates the portion of the display which is needed to show your notification when the handset is in standby mode. And Motorola has stated that the unique combination of these stand-alone processors and custom firmware helps the small, lightweight and compact Droid Mini deliver battery performance at up to 50% better than the competition.
The phone’s dimensions run 4.77 x 2.41 x 0.35 inches (121.25 x 61.3 x 8.9 mm), while still delivering a large True HD 4.30 inch LCD display with 342 ppi pixel density. Talk time is extremely generous at 28.0 hours, and the handset supports wireless charging. 2.0 GB of RAM system memory is on board, as is 16 GB of built-in storage and a 10.0 megapixel “quick capture” camera. That rear snapper is capable of providing video capture at 1,080P HD resolution, and joins a front facing 2.0 megapixel chat cam in the camera combo. The Droid Mini can be purchased at a discounted price tag now starting at $49.99.
