Today I’ll be doing something I’ve never done before. I’ll be reviewing three phones at once, all of which are from the same family yet offer slightly different experiences. Introducing the Droid Mini, Droid Maxx and Droid Ultra, by Motorola.

Right out of the box, it’s easy to tell that these three phones are from the same breed of design. They are all Droids, which is the brand Motorola calls most of its smartphones, aside from exceptions like the new Moto X.

Rather than review each one individually, I’m going to go down a list of features and talk about what each phone contributes to the category. Let’s begin.

Screen: This category is the easiest way to tell the three apart, as the sizes of the phones differ (if slightly) compared to their brothers. The Maxx and Ultra both have 5” screens, while the Mini has a 4.3” display. Each phone has a resolution of 720p (which helps with battery life), and curiously, only the Ultra has an AMOLED display, according to Motorola’s website. Colors pop and text is readable on all three; the only differences I noticed were with the Mini’s screen.

The Mini does whites and colors better than the other, more expensive phones. I’m not sure as to why this is, but it makes the others look pretty bland in comparison. For a small package, the Mini certainly stomped out its siblings in this category. But the Mini takes a hit because of the small screen, which quite frankly felt wrong to hold. It brought me back to my old iPhone days, and that’s a screen size I never want to think about again.

Unfortunately, the brightness of each display is subpar at best. The phones barely surpass the Galaxy S3 in terms of maxing out the brightness, and they don’t even come close to anything the iPhone has ever offered. Surprisingly, though, the best screen of the bunch, the Mini, is also significantly brighter than the others. Still, don’t try to use it outdoors on a summer day without squinting.

Build Quality: Each phone has a Gorilla Glass Screen. Unfortunately, the unibody design that Motorola is going for with these devices suffers the same fate as the HTC One: The backs are nonremovable, which means goodbye to interchangeable batteries and storage. That said, not each of the backs are the same. The Mini and the Ultra, the two less expensive phones, have a shiny plastic back that is as unlikely to hold as the Galaxy series of smartphones. They’re slippery and are notorious for smudge marks. The Maxx, however, has an awesome soft-touch Kevlar backing that feels snug in the hand and ups the “premium” feel quite a bit. The pattern of the texture on the Maxx is also neat to look at; this is one phone I wouldn’t put a case on.

Buttons on all three phones are very large and not at all flush with the style. I don’t like the look, but I’ll bet they prove to be durable for years. They are quite large and stick out a good eighth of an inch or so.

Speed: Each phone is fast, there’s no doubt about that. Never did I see a performance lag from any of them, and each took the same time to load a webpage as the others when all connected to my 5GHz wireless Internet. Pages loaded fast, apps ran great and interface tasks were a breeze. The phones run off of Verizon’s blazing-fast 4G LTE, and each one always had a good connection in my apartment.

Camera: Even though each phone has the same 10 megapixel, 1080p video camera, they all had noticeable issues taking clear photos. Even when not zoomed in at all, the resulting photos looked like watercolor paintings in some spots. I wish I were exaggerating. It’s strange, because the feed you get on the screen looks great… until you snap the shot. This leads me to believe the issue probably lies in the post-processing software the camera uses, which is a shame because I’m sure these are nice lenses.

Each phone has your typical front-facing camera with decent picture quality, but like most phones, it pales in comparison to the rear-facing one.

OS: The phones are running Android 4.2 operating system, and since Motorola is owned by Google, buyers should expect frequent updates. I really enjoy how almost-entirely-clean the experiences are on these devices; never once was I burdened by a dumb gimmick like on a Galaxy phone. The interface is about as stock Android as you can get without being actually stock, some of the options from Motorola that I noticed were a cool clock widget, some security features and a neat gesture option that lets you instantly swipe photos to send them to other Droids. Samsung has a similar service, but using Motorola’s was way more fun.

Speakers: Each phone has the same setup for the camera, speaker and flash on the rear. Each speaker sounded pretty good for a cellphone, and they got very, very loud when pushed to the brink. In the last 25 percent of their loudness, however, the sound quality significantly drops as you can hear the speakers begin to rattle with stress. If you don’t max out the volume on these phones, you’ll be treated to a better-than-average sound quality.

Battery: The Droid family is known for having awesome battery life. I messed around with the phones for about a week (not very heavily, but they certainly went through the ropes), and I never had to charge any of them. The Maxx, also the most expensive phone, boasts a 3500 mAh battery.

I came away from working with these three phones with a new (if limited) respect for the Droid series. The last one I’d ever touched had been the very first one, released back when Android was new and painfully slow/laggy (this is why my first smartphone was an iPhone). Now, seeing the Droids back and better than ever, I think they hold a certain place in the market, but they shouldn’t be considered flagships, simply because of their significant flaws. For being such new phones, having only a 720p screen and such a bad camera make me wonder if/why Motorola will continue to give attention to making more of these phones. Perhaps the Moto X (coming in a review soon) is a sign of a new age of Motorola phones. If that’s true, I don’t want to see the Droid die out, but it could use a serious overhaul.

Droid Maxx: 3.5 / 5

Droid Ultra:: 3 / 5

Droid Mini: 3 / 5

*Levi Castle was not paid, asked or encouraged by Verizon to write positively or negatively about these phones. All opinions are solely that of the author. Verizon simply supplied the demo product.*