Nokia, Motorola Mobility unveil new smartphones

Nokia and Motorola Mobility, both struggling to make headway against Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S III, unveiled several new versions of their smartphones that they hope can chip away at the industry leaders.

The announcements in New York on Wednesday came a week before Apple is expected to unveil a new generation iPhone.

Both companies emphasized how their devices either had better displays, were faster or had longer battery life than the current generation iPhone 4S.

Nokia said its new Lumia 920 touts a 4.5-inch LCD touch screen. The display’s pixel-per-inch count is better than that of the 3.5-inch-screen iPhone 4S, which uses Apple’s Retina technology.

The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant has scheduled a news event Sept. 12, when it might reveal a 4-inch-display iPhone that might best the Lumia 920’s pixel-per-inch count.

On Wednesday, Motorola Mobility announced three new Razr smartphones, saying they were designed with speed and battery life in mind.

Motorola Mobility, now owned by Google, said the flagship of the bunch, Droid Razr HD, has a large, 4.7-inch display even though the phone’s size is the same as that of last year’s Droid Razr.

The Razr HD, which will be available in black or white, will have up to 24 hours of battery life and will come with 16 gigabytes of storage.

The company also announced the Droid Razr Maxx HD, built for heavy battery usage. The Razr Maxx HD can get 32 hours of performance or 21 hours of talk time. It comes in black and packs 32 GB of storage.

Motorola said the Razr HD and Razr Maxx HD would be available before the holidays but did not disclose a price.

The Razr M, which has a 4.3-inch screen in a body the same size as the iPhone 4S, began pre-selling Wednesday afternoon for $99 and will be available next week. The phone will have 8 GB of storage.

The three phones will be available exclusively from Verizon.

All of them will run on a 1.5-GHz dual-core processor and come with 1 GB of memory. The phones will be enabled with near-field communication technology, which allows users to pay for purchases by merely swiping the device in front of an NFC-enabled receiver.

They also include a micro-SD card slot and come with an 8-megapixel back camera. The phones will come with Chrome pre-installed as their Web browser.

Motorola said the new Droid Razrs will run on the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system but will update to Android Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android, before year’s end.

Additionally, the company said most of its 2011 phones will also update to Jelly Bean. Customers who own any 2011 Verizon Motorola phones that can’t upgrade to Jelly Bean will receive a $100 credit to purchase one of the new Droid Razrs.

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