Executives from Verizon, Motorola and Google will introduce a new Motorola Droid smartphone June 23, one day before Apple’s hallowed iPhone 4 hits the streets.
eWEEK received an invitation, which promises “unleashing the next generation of Droid,” to an event in New York City.
Verizon CMO and Executive Vice President John Stratton, Google Android creator Andy Rubin and Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha are presiding over the event.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen will also attend, presumably to pump up the Flash support on the Android devices, which the iPhone 4 won’t have when it comes out the following day.
What isn’t clear is whether the device will be the Droid X or the Droid 2 or both that Engadget, Droid Life and several other gadget blogs have been chronicling over the last several weeks.
Running Android 2.1 (not the new Android 2.2) OS, Droid X sports a 4.4-inch, FWVGA 854 x 480-resolution screen and, like the HTC Evo 4G, has an 8 megapixel camera to record 720p video.
Engadget has more details, including test flights of the large-looking device, here.
Engadget has also chronicled what little is known about the Droid 2, billed as the true successor to the keyboard and touch-screen-enabled Motorola Droid Verizon lured users to last November with a $100 million marketing campaign.
The Droid 2, booted here by Engadget, sports a 3.7-inch display, 8GB of internal storage with an 8GB microSD card, and a 5 megapixel camera, which seems pedestrian in a time of so many 8 megapixel devices.
Droid Life reported that one or both devices could hit the Verizon retail shelves by July 19. If this is true it will give the iPhone 4 a good month to sell against the existing Droid Incredible and HTC Evo 4G.
Perhaps the executives will preview the Droid with the 2 GHz processor Jha sparingly discussed.
Jha said June 9 the 2 GHZ Droid will come by the end of the year. He 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 whether the public gets to see it next week in New York remains to be seen.