Droid Charge Arriving On Verizon April 28th with Hefty $299 Price Tag

Samsung has announced its first 4G LTE phone for Big Red, the Droid Charge, which will be available Thursday, April 28th. It features a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, an 8-MP rear camera with LED flash, a 1.3-MP front-facing camera, 1-GHz processor, Android 2.2 (Froyo), and– its main selling point–support for Verizon’s LTE network. Are you sitting down? The Samsung Droid Charge will cost $299 with a two-year contract, $50 more than the HTC Thunderbolt.

On the plus side, the Droid Charge comes with a 1600 mAh battery instead of the Thunderbolt’s 1400 mAh, which means it should last longer on a charge–without the need for an extended battery. On our tests, the Thunderbolt lasted a mere 3 hours and 56 minutes while continuously surfing over 4G. With 200 more milliampere-hours, we expect that the Droid Charge will come closer to our average Android battery life of 5 hours and 50 minutes.

We’re excited to get the Droid Charge into our hands and see just how fast it is. Verizon says we should expect download speeds from 5 to 12 Mbps and upload speeds between 2 and 5 Mbps, which is in line with the performance we saw during our review of the Thunderbolt. The Droid Charge also works as a mobile hotspot for up to 10 devices over 4G and 5 devices over 3G. As a bonus, Verizon notes that the hotspot feature will be included for free “for a limited time.”

We can’t wait to get our hands on the Droid Charge and test it out. Is it worth $299? Stay tuned.