Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 4 is very much the phone of the moment as it launches at Verizon (VZ) this week, but five 4G phones coming this spring will kick sand on Apple's dandy hand candy.
Motorola Mobility (MMI), Samsung, HTC and LG have promised to deliver supercharged, ultra-thin, 4G Google (GOOG) Android devices in the coming weeks and months.
Each of the phones' screen is at least four inches, setting the size standard for this generation of touchscreens. By comparison, Apple's iPhone is 3.5 inches. And while three of the phones have a 1-gigahertz processor, the Samsung Infuse goes a couple ticks faster with a 1.2-gigahertz chip.
Motorola becomes the first of the bunch to use a dual-core processor from Nvidia (NVDA).
"Apple's decision to leave dual-core and LTE technologies out of the Verizon iPhone shows a degree of complacency that should benefit Motorola," says MKM Partners analyst Tero Kuittinen.
The new line of Apple iPhone killers comes at a particularly good time for AT&T (T), which loses its iPhone exclusivity this week.
To counter the exodus of iPhone buyers to Verizon, AT&T has vowed to make Motorola's Atrix its top phone. The Atrix goes on pre-sale Sunday, February 13, and will sell for $200 with a two-year contract.
The Atrix was a standout at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, along with Bionic, the Verizon version of the phone, previously known as Olympus and Edna.
Sanjay Jha, CEO of the newly independent wireless titan, appears to have taken the Verizon iPhone challenge quite seriously. Motorola is making what has been expected to be a major displacement at Verizon into a compelling 4G alternative to the iPhone.
Here's a look at the top five 4G phones that could dwarf the iPhone.
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LG Revolution, Verizon
LG's focus on feature phones made it a weak player in the smartphone game, but the Korean electronics giant now wants to make up for lost ground in the super-phone category.
The LG Revolution is the heaviest of the five Androids, weighing 6 ounces. But it carries the weight well in a sleek half-inch-thick form with a large 4.3-inch display screen.
The phone runs on Qualcomm's (QCOM) Snapdragon 1-gigahertz processor and has a whopping 16 gigabytes of storage. It has two cameras, one front-facing for video chats and the rear a less-than-robust 5-megapixel shooter.
The Revolution is a 4G LTE phone that is expected to start selling at Verizon in the first quarter.
Samsung Infuse, AT&T
Samsung seems to be trying extra hard to be the iPhone replacement for AT&T. By appearances, the Samsung Infuse looks very much like a large version of the iPhone 4, at least from the front.
Samsung had reasonable success with Android phones in its Galaxy series; with the Infuse, it hopes to take that one more step higher. The phone has a massive 4.5-inch super-AMOLED-plus screen that is designed to provide better resolution and easier daylight viewing.
The Infuse runs on a speedy 1.2-gigahertz Hummingbird single-core processor. Its front-facing camera is a wimpy 1.3-megapixels, but the rear camera captures 8-megapixels. The Infuse runs on the HSPA-Plus wireless technology, which AT&T has recently started calling 4G.
The Infuse, sort of like the 5-inch Dell (DELL) Streak, attempts to push the limits of super-phone sizes in an effort to skirt the fringes of the larger tablet market.
AT&T has said it expects to start selling the Infuse in the second quarter.
HTC Thunderbolt, Verizon
We got a brief look at the HTC Thunderbolt during CES in Las Vegas. It had the best name of the new crop of 4G devices that Verizon introduced at its show. Judging from what we saw, the Thunderbolt looks very much like HTC's popular EVO at Sprint (S), with the same convex back and kickstand.
The Thunderbolt runs on Qualcomm's 1-gigahertz Snapdragon processor, has a 4.3-inch screen and a front-facing camera as well as an 8-megapixel rear camera. All those specs, by the way, are identical to its 4G WiMax brother, the EVO at Sprint.
The difference with the Thunderbolt is that it runs on Verizon's 4G LTE network. The Thunderbolt is expected to arrive in the first quarter and is being hailed as the first Verizon 4G LTE phone. The EVO arrived at Sprint in March last year, so maybe there's a pattern developing.
Motorola Bionic, Verizon
The Droid campaign continues at Verizon, and Motorola has made quite a powerful dual-core, 4G machine to keep that robotic theme churning for another year.
The Bionic will be one of the first dual-core processor phone in the US. Other makers, like LG, introduced an Optimus phone at Nvidia's show in Las Vegas, but the US release date still isn't known.
The reason we care about dual-core is that it promises to deliver more computing speed without draining batteries twice as fast. Nvidia has been promising dual-core mobile chips for three years and, finally, it has some phones using the processors.
Like its super-phone Android peers, the Bionic has two cameras, but the video-chat front-facing camera is a weak VGA quality while the rear is a solid 8-megapixel. And as for flash memory capacity, the Bionic has 512 megabits of RAM and 16 gigabits of storage.
Verizon says it expects to launch the Bionic sometime before the end of the second quarter.
Motorola Atrix, AT&T
If there was one phone that caught the most attention at CES, it was the Motorola Atrix, which AT&T has been promoting like crazy. (Look for TheStreet's hands-on review of the Atrix later this week.)
This Atrix uses a dual-core Nvidia processor like its sister phone the Bionic, and has similar specs. But it also features 1-gigabyte of RAM, the same deployed by small laptops. And curiously, that's how Motorola is pitching this device -- as a pocket computer.
During the Motorola demonstration, the Atrix was docked in an empty laptop shell, which, powered by a keyboard and big screen, made the Atrix the core of a notebook computer. The Atrix is designed to serve as both your super-phone and through a docking system, your PC.
With processing power and memory comparable to a netbook, the Atrix may help push Motorola devices further into the workplace, bumping up against Research In Motion (RIMM) and Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) Palm business.
AT&T announced last week that pre-sales of the Atrix start February 13 and should be available for general purchase in early March.
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