FRAMINGHAM – When Motorola unveiled the DROID RAZR MAXX smartphone at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, the sleek, high-end handheld stole much of the show’s mobile-buzz. It also undoubtedly caused recent DROID RAZR buyers’ blood to boil. That’s because the RAZR MAXX, released less than three months after the first DROID RAZR, is almost identical to its predecessor, with one very significant difference: The RAZR MAXX packs a huge, fixed battery pack that addressed the original DROID RAZR’s battery life issues.

While I would certainly be displeased with Motorola if I had purchased the original DROID RAZR, maybe even furious, I can’t help but love the second iteration, the RAZR MAXX. In fact, I think it’s the best Android smartphone available today. I can practically hear some of you grumbling in disagreement, thinking No way the RAZR MAXX is better than the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. But I disagree. Check out the following list of reasons why I think the DROID RAZR MAXX is the best Android device currently available.

Though the RAZR MAXX is a fantastic handheld, it’s not perfect. Jump to the end of my list for some quick gripes I have with the Android device–or hit this link.

Why I Love the Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX on Verizon

1) Verizon 4G/LTE on the DROID RAZR MAXX is FAST

I’ve been genuinely impressed with Verizon Wireless’s 4G/LTE network in and around Boston where I live and work. I’ve tested the device’s network upload- and download-speeds countless times during the past month or so, and downloads often went as fast as 20Mbps and rarely went below 10Mbps. Uploads were frequently as fast as 13Mbps and they rarely dropped below 5Mbps. That’s consistently speedy, and though the RAZR MAXX obviously isn’t the only Verizon mobile device to see these speeds, it may be the best suited to take advantage of them. Why? Because of its massive battery, which helps the RAZR MAXX keep on trucking on LTE.

2) RAZR MAXX Battery Life is Exceptional

A frequent complaint you’ll hear from Android smartphone users: My battery life is terrible. Indeed, poor battery life is an ongoing issue in the Android camp…but not for DROID RAZR MAXX users.

The RAZR MAXX feature most touted by Motorola is battery life. That’s because the device packs a huge 3300mAh battery, which can deliver around 21 hours of talk time over LTE, according to Motorola. Though I didn’t put Motorola’s claims to the test–I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation on my mobile that lasted 21 minutes, let alone 21 hours–but I rarely ran out of battery over the past month and I often used the device moderately to heavily over a 24-hour period. In other words, the DROID RAZR MAXX has great battery life for a 4G smartphone, which typically get less life than comparable 3G devices.

Just for a comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus has an 1850mAh battery, which means the DROID RAZR’s battery is almost double the capacity of the Galaxy Nexus power pack.

3) Size of DROID RAZR MAXX is Near Perfect

At 131 mm long, 69 mm wide and 9 mm thin, the DROID RAZR is really a near perfect size for a touch screen device with no “physical” keyboard–at least if you have fairly large hands, as I do. When I first got the device, it seemed too large to me because I was used to smaller touch devices like the iPhone and the Motorola Atrix, both of which I’ve used regularly. But the size quickly grew on me, and now it’s difficult for me to use a smaller touch device, though I still prefer the smaller size of my “candybar-style” BlackBerry for devices with “hardware” keyboards.

Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX Unboxing and Hands On
And though the RAZR MAXX is slightly heavy at 145g, due largely to its big battery, the added battery life is well worth the extra weight.

4) Beautiful AMOLED Display on the DROID RAZR MAXX

The DROID RAZR MAXX has a glorious, 4.3″ Super AMOLED display (960×540), which is made of Corning’s Gorilla Glass for added durability. Though the screen doesn’t have as high a resolution as some other high-end smartphones, including the Galaxy Nexus (4.6″ at 1280×720) and the iPhone 4S (3.5″ at 960×640), I prefer its size to any other device I’ve used. And image and video always look crisp and clear to me, so I was never left wanting for a higher resolution display.

5) DROID RAZR MAXX’s Powerful Processor

The Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP 4430 1.2GHZ dual-core processor packed into the DROID RAZR MAXX is a top-of-the-line mobile device processor, and makes the device run like a dream, with little lag even when playing large, HD video files or performing multiple resource-intensive tasks at a time. The Galaxy Nexus packs a slightly more powerful IT OMAP 4460 processor, but I honestly don’t think the Galaxy Nexus needs a faster processor; I experienced little or no lag at all, and graphics were beautiful with the processor Motorola included. That may change when the RAZR MAXX is upgraded to Android 4.0, a.k.a., Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), but for now I’m completely satisfied with the current processor. (More powerful isn’t always necessarily better.)

6) Great 8MP Camera with LED Flash on the DROID RAZR MAXX

The eight-megapixel rear-facing camera on the RAZR MAXX is one of the better digital cameras I’ve found on a mobile device, and it offers users a variety of customization options to help tailor your pictures to your environments. (For comparison, the Galaxy Nexus has a 5MP camera and the iPhone 4S shooter is also 8MP, though MP count really isn’t an accurate measure of digital-camera quality.) I captured a ton of great pics with the RAZR MAXX, and I was pleased with the overall image quality and 1080p HD video I grabbed. It has a front facing, 1.3MP camera meant mostly for video chat sessions, which the RAZR MAXX does quite well via Wi-Fi or 4G.

7) Motorola Webtop OS and Lapdock are Unique

The DROID RAZR MAXX, like a number of its Motorola-built Android brethren, has a cool feature called, Motorola Webtop, which lets you connect your device to a monitor and keyboard or a specially designed “lapdock” to provide a desktop-like work station and experience. Motorola sent me a lapdock along with the RAZR MAXX for review, and I’m very familiar with the Webtop OS because I’ve used a Motorola Atrix, which also has Webtop, for the past year or so.

The Webtop experience is cool, and it could certainly be valuable to business users who want to use their handhelds as their main computing devices. I probably wouldn’t purchase the lapdock, because it’s quite pricey at $250, and it’s basically just a laptop shell without a “brain.” But I could see myself using Webtop along with a monitor and keyboard, to access content stored on my mobile device and to utilize the RAZR MAXX’s speedy Web connection. (See Webtop in action in this video review.)

Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX Quick Review Conclusion

To sum that all up, I really, really don’t want to return my test unit to Motorola. I get a lot of smartphones from wireless carriers and device manufactures to review. I typically use a device for a few days, note what I like about it and what I don’t and then put it aside before sending it back. But my experience with the DROID RAZR MAXX has been different. I’ve used the device almost every day since I’ve had it. And it just keeps growing on me. Because I’m not currently eligible for an upgrade I won’t be purchasing one for myself just yet. But I will sorely miss the RAZR MAXX…for the most part.

Hit the jump for a quick list of things that I won’t miss.

DROID RAZR MAXX May be the Best Android…But It’s Not Perfect

The DROID RAZR MAXX is my favorite Android device on the market today, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t found a few areas that could use some improvement.

All you Galaxy Nexus fans are probably foaming at the mouth right now because I haven’t condemned the RAZR MAXX’s lack of Android 4.0 ICS. Of course, it would be great if the device had the latest version of Android, but the fact that it doesn’t really isn’t a deal breaker for me. The Galaxy Nexus is the only device that officially has ICS, and that alone does not make it the best Android on the market. Android ICS packs a number of cool new features (read details on those enhancements here) but even with Android Gingerbread 2.3.5, the version of Android that runs on the RAZR MAXX, I’d still pick it over the Galaxy Nexus for the above-stated reasons. Also, the RAZR MAXX is slated to get Android 4.0 ICS in the future, according to Verizon, though it may not be until late 2012.

My number one gripe relates to an issue with the devices cellular radios, which causes some problems when you’re in areas with a very weak 4G signal. For example, if you’re right on the edge of an LTE coverage area, your DROID RAZR MAXX will “hop” back and forth between 4G/LTE and 3G/CDMA, as any phone would in such a situation. However, the RAZR MAXX seems to have problems with the transitions, and the device will often get hung up when swapping network technologies.

It happens often enough to warrant this mention. I’ve had to shut my device down on multiple occasions, in order to get it to find network coverage again. The problem gets old fast, especially if you often find yourself in an area with weak 4G cellular coverage. I’ve only used a few other Verizon 4G devices in the past, but I don’t remember any of them experiencing this issue as badly or as frequently as I did with the DROID RAZR MAXX.

Secondly, though the RAZR MAXX build quality is most impressive–it has a Kevlar-coating from Dupont to help protect it from nicks and scratches, as well as a “force field of water repellant nanoparticles, according to Motorola–I had some issues with the volume up and down keys sticking randomly. This is a minor issue, and it could be specific to my device, but having used the handheld for less than two months, this was somewhat worrisome.

The fixed battery pack means you can’t buy a backup battery and swap yours out when you need to, which isn’t ideal. The device isn’t cheap at $299.99 with a new, two-year Verizon Wireless service contract. And Motorola really ought to offer some sort of trade-in program to folks who purchased the initial DROID RAZR with the bum battery. But other than these minor complaints, the DROID RAZR MAXX is a fantastic device I’d recommend to anyone looking for a new Android smartphone.

Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, announced a global partnership with Samsung to strengthen security among Samsung’s Android users  to strengthen security among Samsung’s Android users to address the need of protection of the growing number of Android users in the Philippines from malicious software and other forms of cybercrime.

SEATTLE – In a reversal of sorts, some people are keen to load webOS on their Android devices, now that Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to make the software open source.

HP said earlier Friday that it will make the code behind webOS available under an open-source license. It said the company would be an active participant and investor in the project.

Developers and other webOS enthusiasts are now excited about the possibility of loading webOS onto their Android phones.

“I’m sure this is a little ways off but it would be great if this means we can essentially put webOS on the devices of our choosing. i.e. Droid 2 with webOS,” one person wrote on the PreCentral Forum.

“I’d love to see webOS on my Nexus S,” another wrote on the XDA Developers forum.

That marks a reversal from earlier this year, when people were scrambling to buy HP’s discounted webOS TouchPad tablets with the plan of running Android on them. After HP discontinued its webOS-based phones and tablets, it cut the price of the TouchPad to $99. The TouchPads sold out quickly as people realized it was one of the lowest-cost tablets with quality hardware available. But since buyers feared that HP would abandon webOS, they bought the tablets intending to load Android on them, hoping developers would do the heavy lifting to enable that. One website even offered a bounty to the developer who could port the software first.

While some of the talk Friday mentioned tablets, most is about porting webOS to Android phones. It’s unclear how long such a project might take. HP must first make the webOS code available, and it hasn’t said yet when it will do that. When it does, developers will need to spend time making it work on hardware designed for Android.

But some people expect that work to start soon. “The xda devs will be hard at work soon, bank on that… i see great things coming here. can you imagine running webos on [an Evo 4G] or the galaxy nexus?” one person wrote on the PreCentral forum. XDA is a forum where developers work together on mobile software projects.

SAN FRANCISCO – New phones and tablets with Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich, are just around the corner, and carriers are also announcing which current models will be upgradable, most likely in early 2012. Many of the new features and updates will be great for business users.
Before updating, here’s what you should be thinking about to make the transition to Ice Cream Sandwich safe and painless.

System Updates

Updating the operating system on any device is a process with multiple opportunities for failure:

• • The download of the update could be corrupted, resulting in a failed update.
  • The update process could be interrupted by power, networking, or disk issues, leaving your device unusable.
  • The update could contain bugs that make your device unusable, and could result in data loss or corruption.

If any of these happen, you may need to wipe your device and start from scratch, which could result in the loss of business data, and delays in getting work done. While the odds of problems ruining your day are slim, you can take these steps to reduce the damage, make it easier to recover from, and perhaps prevent the problems in the first place.

1. Clean Up Your Apps

A good way to start is by taking a look at your current setup. We all find great non-business related apps that are soon forgotten after installing them. Go to Settings, Applications, Manage Applications, and removeanyoftheapps you aren’t using or don’t need. This will not only reduce the potential for incompatibility, but also free up more space for the update and the future apps you may want to add.
2. Update Your Apps

If you don’t allow your apps to update automatically, you should manually run the Android Market app and use the “My Apps” setting to check for updates, especially to mission-critical apps. Often apps are updated in response to reported bugs caused by a new version of an operating system. Having those updates installed first will help eliminate any potential problems down the road.

3. Back Up Your Apps

Google’s App Store will remember which apps you’ve purchased or installed for free, and will allow you to install them again (see My Library, Apps in the Android Market), but it doesn’t keep an up-to-date list of the apps currently installed. For this, use an app like AppBrain, which works with an associated website to keep track of your app installing activity, and can save a list of your apps making it easier to restore them should the need arise.
4. Back Up Your Data

You should always have backups of any business data. Much of your data, like contacts, calendar entries, and email, is backed up to the cloud automatically. Other data, especially from third-party apps, may not be–and could be lost should your update go bad. Check your apps for options to sync to the cloud, or export to your SD card. Then, back up your SD card to your computer.

5. Make Your Device Happy

When update day arrives, make your device as comfortable as possible. Be sure your battery is well charged, and keep the device plugged in during the update to avoid an interruption caused by lack of power. Enable Wi-Fi, and be connected to a network so that any attempts by the OS to “phone home”, register, or otherwise finish the process are possible.

SAN FRANCISCO – An Asian boy approaches a man clad in black leather at an outdoor café in Chinatown. He whispers something in the man’s ear. The man grabs his warrior of the future motorcycle helmet and speeds down the streets of San Francisco in pursuit of an armored car caravan. Explosions. Fireballs. Shuriken fly. Back at his lair, the marauder exposes the convoy’s precious cargo: the Droid Razr. A title appears on the screen: Too Powerful to Fall into the Wrong Hands.
That’s one of the more dramatic commercials for Motorola’s hot new Android phone, and while not many Android users have the chiseled good looks or cool clothes of the ad’s action hero, they do like living on the edge — at least unintentionally — when it comes to security, according to the crew at Websense Labs.
“While iPhone users are busy listening to music and watching videos, Android users are surfing through some of the most dangerous areas of the Web,” Websense Labs reports in a recent company blog.

The security firm bases that conclusion on data gathered from the Websense ThreatSeeker Network, composed of 50 million real-time data collecting systems that parse one billion pieces of content daily.

“Android users are more likely to visit sites with real security risks and sites known to have a high probability of leading to real security risks,” the researchers write. “And you can see them surfing through sites on the fringe of criminal activity (Hacking, Illegal or Questionable).”

An analysis of ThreatSeeker data by Websense, shows that Android users visit malicious websites six times more than other mobile users, illegal or questionable sites four times more than other users, and hacking sites nearly eight times more than others.

Not only do Android users have dangerous web surfing habits, but they like to court peril when downloading apps, too, the researchers contended. “While iPhone users almost exclusively get their apps from Apple (with its formal approval process), Android users clearly have no problem downloading apps from a wide spectrum of completely unsanctioned marketplaces,” they note.
Malware Volume Mounts

Criticism like that of the Android ecosystem has been flowing steadily from security firms this year, especially as they see sharp increases in malware directed at the platform. Although Google, the custodian of the open source mobile operating system, has largely shrugged off those knocks, one Google manager just couldn’t take it anymore and recently lashed back at the malware fighters.
“Virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you BS protection software for Android, RIM, and iOS,” Google Open-Source Programs Manager DiBona charges. “They are charlatans and scammers. If you work for a company selling virus protection for Android, RIM, or iOS you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Needless to say, the security firms questioned the Google manager’s expertise in security matters. “What he [DiBona] is missing is that mobile security tools (like ours) do much more than just antivirus,” argues Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at antivirus firm F-Secure. “[A]ntitheft, remote lock, backup, parental control, Web filter — these features are the main reason why people buy mobile security products. They get antivirus as a bonus.”
Other White Hats were less diplomatic toward Dibona. “Am I ashamed of myself?” asks Trend Micro Director of Security Research and Communication Rik Ferguson in a company blog. “Not at all. I’d prefer to offer protection against a growing threat to personal and business security than to bury my head in the sand and defend my stance with wild accusation.”

SAN FRANCISCO – Smartphones and tablets are becoming the PCs of our time, and there are two major players in the game. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android dominate smartphones, with RIM and Microsoft being niche players.

It all feels very familiar, harking back to the Mac vs. PC battle–and analyst Jack Brown suggests the outcome will be the same, with Android dominating by 2014. What can you learn from the past when choosing, using, and managing mobile platforms in the workplace?
Mac vs. PC

In the early days of personal computers in the 1980s, Apple developed the Mac, which allowed the average person to use a computer. It was easy to use, and much better for graphics work than anything else available, so software companies wrote for it, and publishers and graphic artists used it exclusively.

Microsoft released Windows not long after Apple’s introduction of the Mac, and as it improved, more software became available for the PC. Until there was parity, you could get most of the popular software on either Mac or PC. Since there was more competition in the PC market due to Windows being available through multiple hardware vendors, prices dropped, and sales grew.

Today, Microsoft owns the personal computer market, with Apple dominating only a few niches that tend to focus on creative arts like publishing, music and video. Finding your favorite software on the Mac is a challenge since coding for both platforms can be expensive, and most businesses release their software on the more dominant Windows platform.

iOS vs. Android

Many consider Apple’s iPhone, released in 2007, to be the first real smartphone, making it easy for the average person to have the power of a computer in their pocket. As the slogan suggests, “There’s an app for that,” meaning you could do almost anything with these elegant and easy-to-use devices. People flocked to the iPhone, developers wrote apps for iOS, and the competition took note.

Then Google released Android in 2008, and as hardware became available and units started selling, developers started releasing apps for it. Android could be licensed by any manufacturer, so many adopted it, and the variety of Android hardware spanned all price points. The Android Market matured and is on pace to overtake Apple’s App Store within months. And Android hardware outsells Apple‘s by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a recent Nielsen report.
Innovator vs. Mainstream Player

The two stories are similar, pitting the innovator Apple against a mainstream player–either Microsoft or Google–and a single-vendor system against a multi-vendor one. The innovative, single-vendor system sets the tone and gets early adopters, but the mainstream player with multiple vendors wins in the end due to lower costs and greater variety of options. In the tablet market, Apple currently dominates, with Android’s slow start to enter, yet analysts are predicting that in two to three years time, Apple will be the second-place contender.

The Lesson

So how does all of this affect small businesses using these platforms? In the past, many businesses started with Macs, supported a mixed environment of Macs and PCs for a while, and eventually went all-PC. The extra costs involved in managing two platforms on top of compatibility issues and software availability made the migration inevitable.
The same considerations apply now to businesses that must deal with mobile devices. Smartphones can do many tasks, but tablets are more capable for most business needs and are likely to play a part in most business strategies. Should you build your IT plan around iPads since they currently dominate the market? Or, do you wait a bit longer and design your plan around Android tablets, knowing they’re more likely to be the long-term platform in the end?

With today’s virtualization, remote access options, and cloud computing, compatibility is less of an issue, but managing hardware still is. In the end, waiting for Android tablets is the safe bet. The overall tablet market will be more mature, app and hardware availability will be better, and managing and integrating the devices in a business environment will be easier. It’s for these reasons that Android will become the standard for business, just like Windows did. What’s your take?