The Motorola Droid RAZR was a hit last year, and Moto's back this year with the natural evolution of that iconic smartphone: the Droid RAZR HD features a larger, higher resolution display and a faster CPU. And just as with last year's Droid RAZR models, there's a MAXX option with a larger battery and a slightly thicker casing for $100 more. Today we're looking at the RAZR HD with a 4.7" Super AMOLED HD display running at 1280 x 720 and a 2350 mAh battery that sells for $199 with contract and $599 without contract extension.

The Droid RAZR HD runs on the usual 1.5GHz dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual core CPU that we've been in nearly every high end US Android smartphone. It benchmarks similarly to those phones (Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC 8X and more) and it runs Motorola's fairly clean version of Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich (Moto promises an upgrade to 4.1 Jelly Bean by year's end).

The RAZR HD has a Gorilla Glass clad display and an updated Kevlar back that looks and feels wonderful. It's soft touch and grippy but still has that carbon fiber look. The edges are rounded a bit, which looks cool and makes it more comfy in the hand. Gone is the camera hump, and the RAZR HD has an updated camera with improved image and video quality.

The phone has LTE 4G and it's a world phone with GSM and 3G HSPA for roaming overseas. As ever, the battery is sealed inside, and there's a fiddly door that covers the micro SIM card slot and the microSD card slot (similar to the apple's iPhone 5 and HTC 8X, you'll need a paperclip to open it). That makes getting to the SD card painful. Voice quality is excellent and data transfer speeds are par for the course on Verizon's 4G LTE network in our area.

The phone has a front 1.3MP camera, dual band WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, a GPS with GLONASS and NFC.