The Droid Ultra by Motorola is the middle child in Verizon's fall 2013 Moto Droid lineup. There's the Droid Mini with a 4.3" display, our $199 with contract Droid Ultra and the $299 Droid Maxx with double the battery and storage. The Ultra is very similar to the Moto X in terms of software and internals. The exterior is all Droid though, with its masculine, dark and imposing look. Though still clad in very durable Kevlar, the Ultra has sadly gone high gloss, so the Kevlar pattern is less apparent and the phone more slippery. The Maxx keeps the matte finish with underlying diagonal pattern and is our choice for looks and tactile feel. Verizon offers the Droid Ultra in your choice of gloss black and gloss red.
Design and Ergonomics
Though the Ultra has more curved corners than older Motorola Droid RAZR models, it's still wide and tall enough that we wouldn't call it wildly ergonomic. It's also a slippery beast that begs for a case to increase grip. The phone is incredibly thin at 0.28", is well made and the slim bezel makes for a modern look, so it's not all bad news. It does adore fingerprints and our black phone looks simply gross after an hour of use, so keep the cleaning cloth or your shirttails handy. Better yet, if you can afford the $100 extra, get the marginally thicker and heavier Droid Maxx since it won't show fingerprints, isn't slippery and has longer battery life.
Both the power button and volume controls are on the right hand side, and they're quite tactile and thus easy to find when your eyes have better things to do. Motorola went with a very unusual SIM card slot: the nano SIM card drawer (yes, it's smaller than a micro SIM) is capped by the volume controls. Yank on them with a fingernail and you'll remove the nano SIM card holder. There is no memory expansion slot since Google now owns Motorola and Google doesn't love removable storage.
The speaker is at the upper rear so you won't likely cover it with your hand and it's louder and fuller than average, even if it can't compete with the big stereo HTC BoomSound speakers on the HTC One.
Performance and Horsepower
Just like the Moto X, the Droid Ultra runs on a custom 1.7GHz dual core Snapdragon S4 Pro (which usually has 4 cores). These are two Krait 300 cores with Adreno 320 graphics, so performance and benchmarks are actually very good even if they don't beat the two top speed demons, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One. Actually, graphics benchmarks match those two top Android smartphones. In use, you won't feel the difference between those two phones and the Droid Ultra plays 3D games like a champ. There's no lag and no heavy UI overlay to slow things down. In fact, it's more responsive than the Samsung Galaxy S4 that's often bogged down by Samsung's TouchWiz UI overlay and myriad software features.
Motorola includes custom cores that handle the always-on voice recognition and motion detection, and they call it their Moto X8 computing system. Yes, like the Moto X, the phone can listen for your commands even when sleeping and it can handle any command that Google Now supports (finding pizza, getting directions, launching an app and much more). Its off the cuff responses might not be as humorous as Siri on the iPhone, but it does handle natural language queries like Apple's assistant.
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