We’re certainly guilty of dropping the Droid name from time to time; write about the Droid Incredible 2 enough, and it just starts becoming the Incredible 2 after a while. Then again, we’re not Verizon, and we haven’t spent millions developing a highly-recognizable brand. That’s why it’s so surprising to see Verizon apparently taking steps to remove one of its phones from the Droid family, with the Droid Charge now becoming the Charge by Samsung.

The launch of the Charge was hampered by delays, and we didn’t end up getting the phone until the middle of May last year. After that, the phone sort of stagnated, and once Gingerbread finally arrived for the handset in late fall, it pretty much dropped-off the radar. When it first became available, the Charge was only the second LTE smartphone on Verizon, but as more and more 4G-enabled phones arrived, the Charge got pushed to the wayside.

It looks like Verizon might be planning to get rid of the Charge altogether, now offering the phone free-on-contract. If that’s to be the case, though, why go to all the trouble of renaming a phone that won’t be around for much longer? It’s an odd move, sure, and one we wonder if we’ll be seeing again in the future.

Update: We still don’t exactly understand what Verizon’s doing here, but despite removing the Droid name from the latest Charge stuff on its site, it apparently maintains it has no plans to officially change the name.

Source: Verizon

Via: Droid-life