Day in Android 3/15/11: Thunderbolt, New Droids, HTC Pyramid

Finally. Early this morning, Verizon put an end to the suspense. We’ve been waiting for the HTC Thunderbolt for a while now, but more importantly it has been almost a month since the original rumored release date. Now we can say with certainty that it becomes available on Thursday, March 17th. You can nab one at a Verizon Wireless store, or online, for $249.99. What’s cool: you can get mobile hotspot access for free through May 15. What’s not cool: Best Buy is going to offer the device, but raise the price to $299.99 on Saturday. Their loss, I guess. [Boy Genius Report] [Android Police] Spy shots are always fun, and this morning we saw some early pictures of upcoming Motorola Android models. Unfortunately, a familiar pair do not feature 4G LTE, which just seems odd for Motorola Android phones on Verizon. They are the Droid X 2 and the Droid 3. They both bear striking resemblances to their predecessors, and they will contain hardware upgrades. Why they’re not running on LTE I have no idea. But another model, code named Tegra, will run LTE. It looks like another bar-setter, with an HDMI out, dual cameras, and a dual-core processor. Look for that one around the holidays. And click the link for the shots. [Phone Arena] The pictured device is the HTC Pyramid, though that appears to be a code name. It’s a dual-core device, and it has been whetting our appetites for about a month now. I particularly like the 768MB of RAM, up from the standard 512MB. It also packs some quality cameras, 1.3 megapixels in the front and 8 megapixels in the rear. Zak from Android Police thinks we’ll see this debuted at CTIA. Given what we’ve heard about this one, it might cause buyer’s remorse for early Thunderbolt adopters. [Android Police] Quickies

• BGR’s Zach Epstein makes a great point about 4G and why it doesn’t really matter whether the latest generation networks technically qualify for the title. [Boy Genius Report]
• It looks like the Amazon App store is coming along nicely. [Phandroid]
• The Droid Incredible has disappeared from DroidDoes.com, and it could be finished for good. A replacement should be on its way soon enough. [Droid Life]

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.