Motorola Developing 2GHz Android Phone

Motorola’s co-CEO Sanjay Jha said the phone maker is building a new Android phone with a 2GHz processor, or double the speed of the Nexus One, HTC Droid Incredible and HTC Evo 4G smartphones currently on the market.

Conceivably Tech cited comments Jha made the Executives Club in Chicago on 9 June, where he said the Android-based device—it is unclear if it will be run on Android 2.1 or the forthcoming Android 2.2—will come by the end of the year.

Presumably, the device will arrive in time for the 2010 holiday season. Motorola knows something about successful Android phone launches for the holidays. Motorola’s November launch of its Droid device on Verizon Wireless put Android on the map as a contender to the iPhone, whose fourth generation launches on 24 June with a slimmer, more power packed design.

Mind Blowing

Jha confirmed the device will, like the iPhone 4, sport a gyroscope. It will include an Nvidia Tegra-based graphics processor with full Flash 10.1 hardware acceleration. The smartphone will also support 720p output and “HD screen resolution” and integrate a camera with “more than 5-megapixel” resolution.

But the 2GHz processor is the mind-blowing news here. eWEEK tested the Nexus One, Droid Incredible and the recent HTC Evo 4G, and found them all to be really fast. Doubling the processing speed for those handhelds seems surreal. The key will be to see if there have been any improvements to the batteries, which burn out far too quickly.

Jha also said Motorola will feature two to four new phones with front-facing cameras that could be used for video conferencing, similar to what the Evo 4G offers and what the iPhone 4 will feature. The executive reportedly said the Droid is still selling well, with Motorola having a hard time keeping up with orders.

Motorola Droid 2

That’s good news, particularly with one of those potential new phones seen in the wild. Droid Life scored these pictures and a boot video of what it claims is the Droid 2 from Motorola.

The handheld sports the familiar keyboard-plus-touch-screen form factor of the original Droid. The device will reportedly feature Android 2.1, a 750MHz OMAP processor, WiFi tethering and a new version of Motoblur. There is 8GB of internal storage, an 8GB SD card and a 5-megapixel camera. All told, these new Android devices should be able to provide a nice alternative to the iPhone 4, whose arrival is eagerly anticipated.

Nielsen said Apple’s iPhone smartphone market share was 28 percent through the first quarter of 2010, more than tripling the 9 percent share garnered by Google’s Android platform in a budding smartphone war.