Reader Mike F. sent along these pics of soon-to-ship Motorola MPX300. A phone similar to this was launched in the Czech Republic and there is an incredible International buzz around this device. From some of the pictures I’ve seen it’s apparently a Windows CE device dual hinge phone. A completely unique design that I suspect will make it the hot phone to own for 2005 and perhaps thrust Moto back to the top of the mobile phone heap. Typically with designs like this there are manufacturing glitches. We’ll see.
I miss my motorola i700 nextel brick phone. This is the phone you commonly see construction workers use. I could throw that phone as hard as I could at the ground and it would be fine. I doubt this new phone could pass that test. When I work construction with phones, dirt often gets ground into them. On one phone, it ruined the speaker. Few manufacturerers think about durability.
The design is very appealing, no doubt about it. In terms of scale it is not much better than contemporary phones and PDA’s, but it bridges the gap.
Nice looking toy! I think it’ll match my sneakers.
Googled it and found this page:
http://www.directmobilephones.com/motorola_mpx300_main.htm
They have a .wmv file of “mpx as PDA” – showing a few people constantly shifting between phone and PDA modes. A little hokey – but it sure seems a lot smaller in the video, than in the stills.
Nice looking?
To me, it looks like the worst of Motorola design enhanced by old Soviet esthetic! Especially the front which looks like a transcoder from the original Star Trek.
Does anyone here think that music enabled phone will soon kill the iPod? I read that somewhere — Newsweek I think.
They claimed that dedicated music players are a transitional technology. Makes sense to me.
I think iPod will die when Palms and Pocket PCs start shipping with small Hard disks like the ones in iPod. Put one of those in a Palm, which already has a great screen, camera and sound support and iPod will not look so cool anymore.
Does anyone here think that music enabled phone will soon kill the iPod? I read that somewhere – Newsweek I think
Mac/Apple rumor sites frequently mention an up-coming Apple – Motorola deal in the works for a Motorola phone able to play songs downloaded from Apple’s music site (iTunes Music Store).
Forbes has run an article on it:
http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2004/12/16/cx_ah_1216aapl.html
Will such phones “kill” the iPod? People have purchased over 200-million songs which can only be played – so far – on Apple software (iTunes) or on Apple’s iPods. Any “paradigm shift” which can derail that train will be interesting to watch. 🙂
What makes the iPod so popular is that is easy, looks neat, and hit the right price point (The actual functionality was no great innovation.)
That’s almost always the main deal, right?
I got a good look at this phone at a conference in SF last year. My comment to the Motorola people is that dialing a number will be difficult because the keypad is so busy. So, they attempted to show me how it *wasn’t* busy. Check. I told them that they should add a facade or skin over the QWERTY keypad that makes dialing easier. It never happened. I guess it was just me.
I really don’t see this thing usurping the HTC PDA Phones like new the O2 XDA IIs.