Samsung's Droid Charge is the latest 4G phone slated for release on Verizon's network. Photo courtesy of Verizon

First came Motorola’s Droid. HTC’s Droid Eris followed shortly thereafter. Finally, Samsung will add one of its devices to Verizon’s popular “Droid” brand with the Droid Charge, Samsung’s latest Android OS-powered smartphone.

In a release issued on Wednesday, Verizon and Samsung announced that the Droid Charge will be available in the U.S. on April 28 in Verizon retail stores.

The price? A hefty 300 bucks, and that’s after being subsidized with a two-year contract.

From what we can see on the details released thus far, the Charge’s hardware makes the phone no slouch. It’s got a huge 4.3-inch super AMOLED screen, 1-GHz processor and both back and front facing cameras (8 megapixels and 1.3 megapixels, respectively). It’s not running the most recent version of Android, though — the phone comes with 2.2 (Froyo) instead of 2.3 (Gingerbread).

It’s the second 4G LTE-enabled smartphone release for Verizon in 2011, with the HTC Thunderbolt being Verizon’s flagship 4G device. Until the Charge’s release, Verizon lags behind in the number of 4G device choices that its competitors AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile are offering.

Motorola’s 4G Droid Bionic was supposed to launch in the spring as the second 4G device on Verizon’s network, but Motorola has delayed the phone’s release until late summer, as the company wants to rework the phone with “expanded features, functionality and an improved form factor,” according to a statement.

The Thunderbolt has done well for Verizon, with phone sales topping 260,000 in the two-week period between March 17 and the end of the company’s financial first quarter. Though the 4G Thunderbolts sales were dwarfed by those of the 3G iPhone released on Verizon’s network in February: the company boasted 2.2 million iPhone 4 activations in the first quarter.

Of course, there’s a laundry list of other Droid-branded phones from Motorola and HTC we haven’t mentioned (Droid 2, the Incredible, etc.), but it’s Samsung’s first. The Droid branding and initiative revitalized the once-ailing Motorola, and made popular the relatively young HTC corporation.

We’ll have to wait and see what — if anything — Droid does for Samsung.