Motorola has just released details on the Motoluxe and Defy Mini, two new Android phones it's bringing to China, Europe, and Latin America this spring. The Motoluxe is actually available in China and Taiwan already under the XT615 moniker and shares some visual similarities with the Droid Bionic. It's 9.8mm thin and includes a 4-inch "edge-to-edge" screen plus an 8-megapixel back camera with flash and front facing VGA camera. The battery, however, has a lower capacity than the Defy Mini despite including the larger screen — it's 1400mAh and rated for six and a half hours of talk time. The Motoluxe should include an 800MHz Qualcomm processor and 512MB of RAM, if indeed it is unchanged from the XT615.
Like its predecessor, the Defy Mini claims to be "life-proof," offering splash, dust, and scratch resistance in a smaller package than the original Defy. Other specs are decidedly average: Its screen comes in a 3.2-inches (no word on the resolution) and the camera is 3.2 megapixels, plus a VGA front shooter for video chat. However, the 1650mAh battery is rather large for a phone this size and Motorola is promising 10 hours of talk time. There's no word as to what processor powers this device, but we're guessing it's not the fastest out there. To match the rugged nature of the device, Motorola's including some outdoor-specific apps under its "Instrument Dashboard."
There's some bad news on the software front for both devices, however — they launch with Android 2.3, and Motorola is including yet another new user interface called MotoSwitch. This service supposedly learns who you talk to and what apps you use the most to keep that information front and center, and also makes it unlikely these devices will see Ice Cream Sandwich in a timely fashion. Both devices should start rolling out in February, but we'll take a look at these devices at next week at CES.
