Surveying the mobile landscape: Motorola

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	Home / Cell phones / Multimedia smartphones

	Surveying the mobile landscape: Motorola	By Philip Berne, 23 December 2007

Motorola updated the Q and the RAZR this year with the Q9 and the RAZR2? Did they have winners on their hands? We take a look at what Motorola can do to maintain the lead.

Motorola has had some groundbreaking successes in the last few years in the RAZR and the Motorola Q. This past year saw each of those models get a sequel update and the results were, well, underwhelming. Don’t get us wrong, the Q9 and the RAZR2 V9 are indeed, um, new, but that’s about the best we can say about them. They aren’t horrible phones, but they aren’t exciting, or catching, in the way that the originals managed to gain new ground in the mobile market.

There are better Motorola phones out there in the world, you just can’t buy them here. We’ve been very curious to see the Motorola Z8 arrive on these shores, and the Moto MING has also seen a recent update that will never make it stateside. In Korea, an updated, inexpensive new Star Tac is available, but in the U.S. we just get more RAZRs. What do we expect from Motorola next year? RAZR2s in thirty colors, with mild improvements along the way.

What would we like to see from Motorola? How about the touch screen ROKR that’s appearing in Asia this year? How about the Linux OS that’s hardly being taken advantage of? Even more interesting, though, is wondering what Motorola will do with it’s massive stake in UIQ, the Symbian interface that Sony Ericsson uses for their own smartphones. Motorola has its fingers in plenty of OS pies, but now that it owns a stake in UIQ, we’d expect the company to roll out more of these devices.

We’re curious because we’ve seen some interesting improvements to the Symbian OS, and all our intuition has led us to believe that UIQ will jump on these enhancements faster than Nokia’s S60 camp will. We’ve seen graphical improvements to the UI that will enhance future touch phones, obviously to compete with the iPhone. Beyond that, networking improvements could bring Motorola-branded UIQ smartphones to T-Mobile’s UMA HotSpot @Home network.

But, most importantly, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Motorola eke out one interesting design in the year ahead. Updates to the RAZR, like RIZR and the KRZR, were already flopping before the RAZR2 dropped this year, so Motorola must have known that a fresh infusion of design acumen was necessary for the lineup. We think the timing could be right to see something interesting from the leading U.S. manufacturer before the year is out.