FCC filing shows Droid Bionic won’t be a global phone

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Handhelds, Rumors

A draft of the Motorola Droid Bionic's user manual surfaced on the Federal Communications Commission's website, confirming most of the specs that were pulled from Motorola's website last week.

On paper at least, the dual-core smartphone built for Verizon's super-fast LTE network looks like a beast. The filing confirms that it will sport a 4.3-inch qHD display, a GHz TI OMAP 4430 dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, a microSD card slot, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a VGA front-facing camera. It'll have an HDMI 1.4 output for mirroring the phone's display on a larger screen and support wireless charging. Furthermore, the Bionic will run Android 2.3.4 "Gingerbread."

But there's been some confusion about the phone's supposed global capabilities, since the manual posted on the FCC includes a section showing how you can switch from Verizon's CDMA network to GSM 900.800 or UMTS 2100 networks used outside the U.S.

And another part of the filing further confirms that the Bionic is definitely not a global phone (in the sense that it includes GSM radios) showing that the device only supports LTE, CDMA, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth (see below).

The Droid Bionic is said to launch in September. It's release could come close to coinciding with another highly-anticipated global CDMA phone expected to launch on Verizon this September or October (depending on your favorite rumor): Apple's next-generation iPhone 5.

This article, written by Sara Yin, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc.