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Best of Motorola at CES 2009By Philip Berne, 10 January 2009
Motorola unveiled an all-touch business phone, a recycled phone, and showed off its recent luxury addition on the CES show floor. Check out our hands-on impressions.

An all-touch Windows Mobile phone

Motorola tosses their hat into the ring of manufacturers improving upon Windows Mobile with an improved, custom interface design. The Motorola MOTOSURF A3100 is a 2.8-inch touchscreen up top with a trackball on the bottom, which seems like an interesting combo to us. The device comes with a stylus, but that new Motorola menu system begs to be touched. It uses a carousel of icons that swim by on the bottom, but in the hands-on demo we saw of this device, those icons seemed to be swimming upstream. Hopefully, Motorola will work on improving the performance of the UI with the touchscreen before launch. In any case, we thought the phone's onscreen keyboard was nice, if a bit small, but we're mainly curious as to how far the interface tweaks have gone. As is always the case with these modified WinMo phones, the deeper you dig, the more likely you are to hit dirt.

A phone that won't harm your hearing, or the planet

To us, the simple addition of Motorola's CrystalTalk technology makes the Motorola W233 Renew a compelling addition to T-Mobile's lineup. We like the mass-market simplicity, which makes sense on a phone that brags heavily about its carbon-neutrality. The phone's plastic is made up mostly of recycled bottles, which Motorola claims uses less energy, and there are other environmental safeguards in place during the phone's production. Most of all, though, we like the fact that this simple, recycled phone benefits from Motorola's enhanced calling technology, because good call quality is really what most buyers are looking for in a simple calling and messaging device.

The $2,000 luxury phone

The Motorola Aura is gorgeous, an obvious marvel of engineering, and it costs $2000. It's almost impossible to end a sentence describing the Motorola Aura without mentioning that it costs $2000. See? We didn't want to like this overpriced, pretentious device, with its Swiss bearings and sapphire crystal face, but the circular LCD screen is so unusual, it's very striking. The interface was fine, matching the circular screen nicely, but it was nothing special. The overall build quality was very tight, though, and the phone swung open with a smooth and assured click. It's a gorgeous, unique device, and did we mention it costs $2000?

Motorola's rugged phone for AT&T

Competing directly with the Samsung Rugby, also part of AT&T's nascent, rugged PTT lineup, the Motorola Tundra is rugged and tested to military specification for drops, dust, vibration, humidity, severe temperatures and rain. So, it isn't technically water proof, but it can get plenty wet. Surprisingly, the phone also gets the full complement of AT&T's 3G services, including AT&T Music, GPS navigation with TeleNav, as well as a host of specialized business features to track a workforce, such as TeleNav Track. We got our hands on the phone here in Las Vegas, and it felt just as we expected, like a small, durable brick. The Motorola Tundra will cost $200 when it's released on January 13.
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