Verizon and Motorola’s new Droid Razr HD and Razr Maxx HD might have hit a few bumps on their road to the market, but, as if to prove their releases won’t take much longer, Amazon has slashed the price of the original Razr Maxx.

Although Verizon is still stubbornly asking $199.99 with a 2-year contract for the almost year old 4.3-incher, if you choose to go through Amazon Wireless you’ll only have to pay $49.99 for the handheld. The offer is valid for both new Verizon customers and existing ones wanting to add a line to a family account, but not for users that want to upgrade their phone and get a contract extension.

Those will themselves be able to take advantage of a special promotion however, being asked to pay $69.99 for the first gen Maxx. Finally, if you’d like to break free from contract restrictions and get an unlocked phone, Amazon Wireless will charge you a steep $649.99, which is the exact price as on Verizon.

Now, you might ask yourselves whether a somewhat outdated high-end-ish phone is still worth 50 bucks with a new 2-year carrier agreement seeing as its successor is just around the corner. Well, in a nutshell, the answer is yes, definitely, heck yeah.

It’s true, you’ll have no problem in finding phones with better screens and snappier processors than the 960 x 540 pix res panel and dual-core 1.2 GHz TI OMAP CPU of the Razr Maxx. It’s also true that the device has just recently been updated to Android 4.0 ICS, so a Jelly Bean software leap might be pretty far along the way.

However, the 3,300 mAh Li-Ion battery powering the Razr Maxx is worth every penny of the $50 asked by Amazon and every day of the 24-month Verizon contract. That mammoth of a battery was the Maxx’s main selling point from day one and is still the standard in the Android phone market. Not even the much larger phablets from Samsung and LG can’t undercut this big guy’s “juice”, rated at about 21 hours of talk time between charges.

If you do decide to follow our advice and take advantage of Amazon’s deal, you should probably hurry up and place your order ASAP. There is no expiration date for the promotion on the retailer’s website, but we’re betting it’ll either be terminated soon enough, or the stocks will be exhausted. We remember very well how Amazon cut the Maxx’s price from $200 to $100 back in June only to get it back up to $150 soon after, and you wouldn’t want such a thing to happen again, would you?