We're live from New York, where three new Motorola Android phones have been announced during Verizon's Droid event. The Motorola Droid Mini is the cheapest of the bunch, starting at $99 (£65) on a two-year contract. The Droid Ultra takes the middle spot, at $199, with the Droid Maxx the largest and most expensive, at $299

Featuring Kevlar unibody designs, the three handsets share similar attributes and styles, but offer slightly different options. Motorola hasn't ventured too far from its typical Droid design that it has stuck to on Verizon for many years, but it's an update for Android aficionados.

motorola droid ultra droid maxx and droid mini all official these are the droids you re looking for image 2

To start, Motorola says the 4.3-inch Droid Mini is "compact without compromise". As a successor to last year's Droid Razr M, it features many of the specifications of the larger Droid Ultra, though in a much smaller form-factor. Specifications include a 1.7GHz dual-core processor, 16GB of onboard storage, 2GB of RAM, and a 2130 mAh battery.

The 5-inch Droid Ultra features a 10-megapixel camera, with 1080p video with a f2.4 lens. It's being promoted as the thinnest 4G LTE smartphone on the market, at 7.18mm thick. 

The 5-inch Droid Maxx is an upgraded version of the Ultra, with a 48-hour battery life. It's a little fatter at 8.5mm, but 9 per cent thinner than the previous generation. Specifications include a a 1.7 GHz dual-core CPU with quad-core graphics, with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory.

Most notably, Motorola is bragging about its Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System with backing from Qualcomm. It combines eight cores on each handset - two for apps, four for graphics, one contextual and one for natural language - that should surely bring a huge amount of speed.  Motorola says that's 24 per cent faster processing than older versions and twice as fast on graphics. Surprisingly, Motorola and Verizon representatives have said they won't be revealing all of the specifications today, which seems odd for an event focused on announcing the smartphones.

As for software, the new Droids feature Active Display that keeps notifications on the screen without turning the whole device on, Quick Capture for faster photo taking, and Droid Zap, which allows you to share photos with friends within 300 feet of you using a two-finger gesture. Hands-free voice control and Google's augmented reality game Ingress are also pre-loaded.

The Droid Ultra, and Droid Maxx ship on 20 August, with pre-orders beginning today. The Droid Mini ships on 28 August. 

You can read our hands-on with the handsets here

Rik Henderson and Elyse Betters contributed to this report.