4. Motorola.
Google is no longer just a provider of operating systems, it has become a smartphone vendor itself with its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Although the primary motive of the purchase was to take Motorola's wide portfolio of patents in order to fend off litigation against the Android, Google's execs are saying that Google's venturing into hardware. Verizon

Motorola Droid Bionic, one of the most anticipated smartphones this year along with iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S2, is launching on Thursday on Verizon’s fast 4G network.

While iPhone 5 is still stuck in rumors about its release date and Samsung Galaxy S2 has faced reluctance from Verizon, waiting for Sprint to launch Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch after Sept.16, Droid Bionic has grabbed quite a bit of limelight.

Verizon will begin selling the Android 2.3-based Motorola Droid Bionic at $299.99 with a two-year contract.

Droid Bionic, which is a potential challenger to the iPhone 5, will come with a ZumboCast app, which lets you access videos, music, pictures and documents stored on PC or Mac. The phone also supports Video Surf, NFL Mobile, support for Netflix, Shazam-like app for videos and Motoprint for wireless.

The smartphone has qHD (540 x 960 pixels, 256 ppi pixel density) TFT display for its 4.3-inch screen, featuring movie friendly aspect ratio of 16:9. Droid Bionic has a dimension of 127x66.8x10.9 mm.

Bionic is powered by a dual-core 1GHz TI's OMAP 4 chipset processor. It comes with 8-megapixel 3264x2448 pixels offering 1080p HD video capture. Droid Bionic is the first Verizon LTE phone to shoot 1080p HD video.

The phone also includes the Web Top application to connect to laptop and use the phone interface on the laptop computer, helping consumers to make calls, send texts, or run GoogleDocs, browse through Firefox 4 browser along with access to more than 200,000 Android Marketplace apps.

Consumers may have to shell out $299.99. But if they purchase it, they may get a $100 mail-in rebate on subscribing the minimum data plan of 5GB for $50. Bionic monthly plan is offered at $70 a month for 450 minutes of talk time and 2 GB of data while mobile hotspot functionality can be turned on for $30 for a month with an additional 2 GB of data.

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