Droid Razr Maxx: Best Verizon Battery Life Ever

Our review of the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx is going up later today, but we'd like to confirm what you may have already heard elsewhere: in our tests, the Razr Maxx has the longest talk time of any Verizon Wireless phone we've ever tested, along with the longest video playback time and the longest 4G streaming time. In fact, this is the first 4G LTE phone where you won't have to worry about the battery running out before the end of the day.

In tests run over the past few days, the Razr Maxx checked in with 16 hours, 45 minutes of continuous 3G talk time; 14 hours, 15 minutes of playing a locally stored video with the screen at maximum brightness and one email account attached; and 6 hours, 57 minutes of continually streaming audio over a 4G LTE connection.

Let's compare that to the original Droid Razr: the older phone got 8 hours, 42 minutes of talk time and 3 hours, 40 minutes of 4G LTE streaming, which is about par for the course with many of today's LTE phones.

At the moment, I've had the phone unplugged, using it normally for gaming and Web surfing, with two Gmail accounts, the Facebook and Plume Twitter clients running in the background for the past 18 hours and I'm at about 60 percent battery, with the sharpest drops coming during times when I was installing a lot of apps and when I was underground and the phone was searching for signal.

The reason for this great battery life isn't a mystery: the Razr Maxx packs in a 3300mAh battery, one of the largest we've ever seen on a phone. But since the Razr was so slim to begin with, the Maxx still isn't very thick.

The phone's battery life can be further enhanced with Motorola's Smart Actions, which does things like automatically stop syncing email accounts at night if the phone's screen is off and the device is sitting still. That helps with another typical Droid problem, the terrifying "DROID!" sound erupting in the middle of the night if you get email.

A little bit of trivia: while the Razr Maxx has the longest talk time of any Verizon Wireless phone, it doesn't have the longest talk time of any phone on the market. That award belongs to the , which combines a large battery with the very power-efficient EDGE protocol to get 22 hours, 29 minutes of talk time.

I'll have a full Droid Razr Maxx review later today, and I can tell you already that the phone is getting our Editor's Choice for full-touchscreen smartphones on Verizon Wireless. For now, take a look at our existing , as well as our and the slideshow below.