Hands On: Motorola’s Droid Razr M

By Nathan Olivarez-GilesEmail Author

On Wednesday in New York, Motorola’s CEO, Dennis Woodside, introduced a lineup of three new Razr smartphones, the first handsets of what he called a “new Motorola” — a hardware manufacturer, owned by Google, that seeks to offer the best Android handsets on the market.

But the first phone of Motorola’s new era, the Droid Razr M, doesn’t feel very new at all. Rather, the Razr M is essentially a very attractive repackaging of previously used parts pegged at an enticing price point: $100 on a 2-year Verizon data plan.

The most noticeable piece of the Razr M brought over from the old Motorola is its Super AMOLED PenTile display. The 4.3-inch display, with a 960 x 540 resolution, is essentially the same display we saw on last year’s Droid Razr and Droid Razr Maxx. Let me put this as plainly as possible: PenTile displays stink. The mobile industry really needs to give up on them, especially the two biggest purveyors of PenTile screens — Motorola and Samsung.

The PenTile subpixel arrangement on every Droid Razr handset released so far results in discernible pixels and jagged edges between colors, especially visible whenever white and black butt up against each other, as they do on many app icons and text.

The “qHD” resolution is also tough on the eyes. In the age of HD video and games, there’s no good reason to deliver a smartphone with a 960 x 540 resolution. I’d like to see at least 1280 x 720, as we saw on Motorola’s recent $100 Atrix HD, but instead we’re left with a lower-resolution screen that results in web browsing that feels cramped, video that doesn’t look as detailed as it should, and noticeable pixilation of text and images.

The Razr M has a thin, wedge shape that is both attractive and comfortable to hold

Inside is a speedy 1.5GHz, dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of included storage and a microSD card slot for expanded storage — same setup as what’s found in the Atrix HD. After just a few hours of hands-on time, the Razr M feels adequately quick but with the occasional slowdown when launching an app or returning from an app to a homescreen.

The Razr M runs on Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, lightly skinned in Motorola’s user-interface changes. An update to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will reportedy arrive before the end of the year, but Motorola’s version of Ice Cream Sandwich is the best offered by any hardware maker, due in large part to the fact that the company left most of the software unchanged. The Razr M does come pre-loaded with apps from both Verizon and Amazon, one of Google’s biggest Android rivals. We’ll reserve judgment on the inclusion of those apps for our full review.

Aside from the display, everything else on the outside of the Razr M looks good. It’s about as thin as Apple’s iPhone 4S but features a wedge-like shape that is both unique and comfortable to hold. The chassis has a matte finish, in either black or white, that gives off menacing hot-rod vibe, and there are six small black screws, three on either side, that lend an industrial feel. The Razr M has seams, and it doesn’t try to hide them. Rather, they’re a part of the design, and it looks good.

The Kevlar back, which seals the non-removable battery in place, is a carryover from last year’s Razr and the pre-Google Motorola that I really like. Going with Kevlar helps the Razr lineup be both thin and light — and it looks awfully cool, too.

A carry-over from the old Razrs we like: the Razr M’s kevlar back

Is Google Finally Getting That Design Matters? First Look at the 2012 Android Development Kit

By Tim Maly

You may think of Android as an OS for phones and tablets, but Google’s ambitions run deeper. They’re pitching it as a platform that could run on all kinds of devices. To get developers on board with that plan, the company announced an update to the Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK) 2012 at Google I/O.

The ADK allows makers to quickly get up to speed on the platform’s function, but we were much more impressed with how great the form looked, especially when compared to the bare-bones 2011 edition. Has Google finally been bit by the design bug? We spoke with Android Communications’ Gina Scigliano to find out more.

The ADK 2012 comes out of the box as a working alarm clock and audio dock that’s compatible with your Android devices. Why an alarm clock? “Because it’s the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning!” says Scigliano. By making an object that fits into your life, Google hopes that you’ll be more likely to think about it when you’re deciding what to hack up next.

If you do decide to go deeper, Google has made that as easy as possible. The box is held together by magnets — there’s not a screw in sight. Squeeze it in the right place, and it pops open, revealing an Arduino-compatible board attached to an army of sensors.

The board can be detached if you want but with the included abilities to measure light, color, proximity, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, acceleration, and the local magnetic field, to say nothing of the capacitive buttons, an SD card reader, USB, Bluetooth, LEDs and a speaker, there’s plenty to do using the kit.

“We ended up putting in a bunch of sensors without really knowing what we would use them for,” says Scigliano, “hopefully [they] will inspire people to make all kinds of interesting accessories, especially ones that nobody has made before.”

The kit you see here is a limited edition reference design. Only people who made it to Google I/O will get the boxes, but the schematics are available online. “We want people to copy the ADK,” Scigliano says, “both direct copies and heavily modified derivatives.”

The point is to lure makers and designers into giving the platform a try, at all levels of skill. The kit is very user-friendly, even for beginners. It’s designed to be easy to set up and customize out of the box. Interested in going deeper? Google will share all the details, right down to the source code and hardware schematics.

To get hackers fired up, Scigliano offers some possible uses the kit: “a smarter homebrew robot, picosatellite, hotel room alarm, irrigation controller, motorized remote controlled drapes, smart thermostat, egg timer with atmospheric pressure compensation, talking clock, data logging weather station, and did I mention robots? It’ll be really fun to see what people build.”

Nexus 7 Tablet and Android Jelly Bean Announcement Expected Today At Google I/O Conference

By JOANNA STERN

Apple and Microsoft both had their turns to show off their latest software and hardware this month; today it is Google's turn.

Google executives will take the stage at the annual Google I/O Developer's Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where they will show off the latest versions of Google software, including Android and other services.

Google's next version of its Android operating system is expected to be one of the major points of conversation. Like earlier Android versions, this one is named after a dessert -- Jelly Bean. Ice Cream Sandwich, the current version of Android, was announced last November. Before Ice Cream Sandwich, there was Gingerbread and Honeycomb. Google put out a statue of a bowl of jelly beans at its Silicon Valley campus yesterday.

While there haven't been many details to spill out yet about Jelly Bean, Google is likely to announce a tablet to go along with the new operating system. Rumored to be called the Nexus 7, the tablet is said to have a 7-inch screen, a fast quad-core processor, and a very affordable $199 price. The tablet is expected to go head-to-head with Amazon's Kindle Fire. These rumors have been widely reported, and most recently the Wall Street Journal corroborated the reports.

While there have been lots of Android tablets released, none have been as successful as the iPad. It is expected that the Nexus 7 will ship in July and that Taiwanese manufacturer Asus is making the tablet itself. Microsoft's Windows 8 Surface tablets, which were announced last week, aren't expected until later this year.

But Google isn't only expected to talk about Android and its tablet strategy. The search giant will discuss its maps platform and other services like its Cloud storage solutions, including the new Google Drive. Apple recently ditched the Google Maps in iOS 6; it has created its own 3-D mapping for the iPad and iPhone.

Over 5,550 thousand developers will be at I/O this year. A Google spokesperson also said that the mini-kitchens at the Moscone Center will stock 1,455 pounds of snacks for the three day event. ABC News did see a Jelly Belly truck pull up in front of the conference center yesterday.

Robot 'Skin' Built With Touch Superior to Humans

By Stephanie Mlot

Robots may not have a sense of emotional feeling, but thanks to researchers at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, they may soon have the gift of physical feeling.

With the right sensors, actuators, and software, robots can be given the ability to feel, or at least identify materials by touch, the school said.

Researchers today published a study in Frontiers in Neurorobotics said said a specially designed robot built to mimic the human fingertip can actually outperform a living person in identifying a wide range of materials, based on textures.

Biomedical Engineering Professor Gerald Loeb and recently graduated doctoral student Jeremy Fishel created the BioTac, a biologically inspired tactile sensor. With their new technology, the researchers explored the robot hand's ability to distinguish 117 common materials gathered from fabric, stationary, and hardware stores. The robot's 99.6 percent performance rate in correctly discriminating pairs of similar textures was better than most humans would test, according to researchers.

While the machine is good at identifying which textures are similar to each other, Loeb and Fishel said it still can't tell what textures people will prefer. Instead, success in the realm of touch-sensitive robotics could pave the way for advancements in prostheses, personal assistive robots, and consumer product testing, the university's press release said.

More than a one-trick robot, the machine is capable of other human sensations, like discerning where and in which direction forces are applied to the fingertip, and even the thermal properties of an object. Fingerprints on the surface of the BioTac sensor's soft, flexible "skin" enhance its sensitivity to vibration.

What's next —robot tear ducts? Or bionic ear drums?

In 2010, a team of researchers from Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and iRobot discovered a "universal gripper," built out of a balloon and coffee grinds. The basic-science concept enhanced the area of robotics, a University of Chicago physicist said at the time.