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There is an interesting situation on Verizon’s website concerning their Motorola Droid Turbo. The website claims – see below – that the DROID Turbo is now running Android 5.0.2, when indeed it is still clearly running KitKat. Did Verizon prematurely update their website or was the update supposed to go out and was delayed or is it coming later today or tomorrow? Another interesting tidbit is that according to Jose Arturo, a Verizon Test Engineer, not only was the update to arrive in mid-June, but it was supposed to be Lollipop 5.1, not the 5.0.2 listed on the website.
A couple of weeks ago, Arturo told us to expect the Android Lollipop update in mid-June and the difficulties having the DROID Turbo – or any device for that matter – on the Verizon’s CDMA voice network. He says, “…The unique situation Verizon finds itself is having its original CDMA voice network…Hard for us to dance around between LTE and CDMA to support VoLTE due to best signal strength in different environments. So with each device update, there is usually a few Qualcomm patches to improve that transition and try to cover all possible calling scenarios our customers may face in our network. And also supporting XLTE new bands. Some device updates turn on a new LTE band on a phone that might have been dormant in an earlier software build.”
He goes on to say, that Qualcomm might fix something one place and it breaks another – not uncommon in electronics. Every time Qualcomm does a fix, Motorola has to retest it and this takes time and money, and many times the delay is waiting for the funding for test verifications. While this understandable, it doesn’t help DROID Turbo owners that are waiting for their update, whether it is Lollipop 5.0.2 or 5.1.
It was not that long ago that the Motorola DROID Turbo did some tweaking of the design with new ballistic nylon versions with colorful new accents and Verizon even left off their own logo over the DROID logo, giving it a cleaner look. The new colors include Metallic Blue, Metallic Orange, and Metallic Violet. The new versions will be available online or in any Verizon Store at $499 for an outright purchase, which is a $100 price drop from the original $599 price tag, $99 on a two-year contract or if you go through Verizon Edge, you are looking at $20.83 per month for 24 months.
