Everyone complains about smartphone battery life, so it’s amazing to me that no phone has ever been released with a truly awesome extended life battery.

Well, make that no phone “had” been released, as the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx knocks out all contenders in terms of battery life and will make charging a much less common affair. To be perfectly clear here, the Droid Razr Maxx is the exact same phone as the Droid Razr, it just has a much better battery. And since the Razr comes with top-notch specs, and was one of my favorite phones last year, I would bet the farm that the Maxx will be a blockbuster, as it addresses the key concern so many people have about their phones.

EXTREME BATTERY LIFE
Let me break down the numbers, so you know how big the advantage is.
The big thing that drains battery life on phones is data use, especially programs that are more data-intensive like Pandora Radio or Netflix. In my testing of the Razr Maxx, I opened up Pandora when the battery was full and let it run all day until it was completely drained. In the process, I was very impressed to see that the phone did not run dry for 16 hours.
To put this in perspective, I would be lucky to get half that much battery life on other smartphones if I ran Pandora nonstop. Some would be closer to 35 or 40 percent of that total.
For those who watch movies on their phones via Netflix, the numbers will be very similar. Lots of life, lots of movies before recharging.

This is the big selling point on this phone. If you like to run apps like this for many hours a day, you can still go a couple or even three days without charging the phone (really, no one is going to run Pandora for 16 hours, as I did in the test. We usually have other stuff to do during the day.)
If you’re a big talker, Verizon promises 21.5 hours of continuous talk time before the battery dies. I don’t really use my phone too much for talking that much, so I didn’t get to test this out, but even if they’re a few hours too generous with that number, that’s still a very impressive number. Standby time is listed at up to 380 hours.

This is all due to the 3300 mAh Lithium Ion battery on the Razr Maxx, a number which stomps all over the competition’s numbers. The regular Razr only has a 1780 mAh Lithium Ion battery, and some other phones on Verizon and elsewhere are even less impressive.
To sum it up in a sentence, however often you charge your phone currently, if you get the Droid Razr Maxx your worst case scenario is you’ll have to charge it half as often, maybe even less. Not too shabby

The only beef I have with the battery is kind of a fairness issue: Why wait to introduce this and make two versions? If I was an early adopter of the Razr, and couldn’t upgrade to the Maxx, I would be very annoyed. They should have skipped the original and gone straight to this one.

LOOKS
You still have a big (4.3 inch), very slim and attractive phone in the Droid Razr Maxx, though it is slightly thicker than the original Razr due to the bigger battery. You cannot remove the battery on the phone, but since you really don’t have a bigger battery option that you could switch to, that’s not a concern. Like the original, you get a Kevlar reinforced backplate, and the Gorilla Glass on the touchscreen does a great job to protect the phone in case of drops.

OPERATING SYSTEM
Like the original Razr, the Maxx still features Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but an upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is promised soon. It’s a bit of a disappointment that it’s not there yet, as ICS has some very nice improvements to the OS, but it’s not the end of the world to have to wait probably a few months for it.

SPEED
Without going into all the details, the specs that carry over from the original Razr are top-notch; from the high-end cameras, to the 1.2 GHz dual-core processor to the 4G LTE Verizon network that you can access for ultra fast downloads and uploads. To get a full rundown on the specs on the Razr and Razr Maxx, go online to (http://bit.ly/A0sQaS )
PRICE
The Droid Razr Maxx will cost you $299.99 with a two-year contract. This is $100 more than the original RAZR, and trust me that $100 is worth it (just think of electricity costs for twice the charging over a two-year span. At this point I don’t know why anyone would buy the original RAZR.

BOTTOM LINE
If you want the best smartphone battery out there on the market right now, the Droid Razr Maxx is the way to go. And with the original Razr already being a great smartphone in terms of overall specs and performance, I can see the Maxx and its supercharged battery being a huge hit for Verizon this year. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a bunch of copycat extended battery smartphones in its wake, as others wonder why they didn’t do it first

Matt Myftiu can be reached at matt.myftiu@oakpress.com or 248-745-4617. Follow him on Twitter @MattMyftiu or become a fan of the Facebook page “OPTechTime”.