What's fresh about the Bionic is that it's running a 1 GHz dual-core processor and connects to Verizon's 4G LTE network. As with all other LTE phones, the Bionic's connectivity rocks, and it now has a processor that can keep up.

The Bionic can also act as a mobile hotspot for up to five devices. And like its cousin, AT&T's Motorola Atrix 4G, the Bionic can hook up to a variety of accessories, including a . (Pricing for the Bionic's lapdock was not available when I wrote this.)

Motorola Mobility has also made some interesting tweaks to the vanilla UI, raising the specter that some of them might find their way into later revisions from . The main Home screen now has four user-configurable speed-dial targets; texting and camera apps now appear on the bottom of every Home screen. Motorola appears to be rolling out that interface to other phones through updates.

Perhaps more consequentially, you can now organize your installed apps by groups; you can show a menu of just your games, just your core apps, just your social apps, whatever. It's quite convenient, and better than its iOS counterpart functionality.

As far as basic functionality goes, calls sounded good and camera quality was generally OK, though like any other phone camera, no one would mistake it for a digital SLR.