Ken’sTechnology Blog

Verizon has been busy promoting Motorola’s Droid as the iPhone killer. While that campaign is clearly going to fail and how, the Droid itself is actually quite a nice device. It has Android the way Google wanted it to be, and hence it is a ‘Google Experience’ phone. Everyone I know likes the Droid and is willing to at least give it a try, even if they are iPhone owners. Verizon should be happy that at least the phone is good enough, even though its campaign is stupid.

So why does Verizon want another Android phone from Motorola that is build along the lines of the Droid but is nowhere nearly as attractive? I guess the need to have something for the economy class is just too much for Verizon. But the new Calgary from Motorola clearly shows that Motorola is capable of going from real brilliance to total WTF.

And now it seems like they are also capable of total showy bling. I am talking about the Aura of course. This joke of a phone, that used to cost £1400 earlier, has now been raded to cost a whopping £3500. Why, you ask? Well because Motorola was getting tired of all the positive press about the Droid.

Droid is perhaps the first phone in recent times to have gotten Motorola some praise. Other than that, they have either been ignored or dismissed. We can safely say that CLIQ did not click at all and the MOTOBLUR thing was confusing at first (is that the name of the phone or something else) but later on it was found to be plain detestable.

The new Aura is has the same flimsy structure, the useless round display and the by-now-obsolete rotating mechanism as the older Aura. The upgrade has been mostly cosmetic. The new AURA has 24-carat gold plating and 30 round cut diamonds on its face, making it even more bling. So if you are all Gucci, Prada and Armani all over the place, this phone will look good with your outfit. But don’t expect it to do much because this dumbphone is as dumd as they get. Texting and making/receiving calls are alright but forget emails, apps and any such thing that we have come to expect from modern phones.

So Motorola, remind me once again – why am I paying this much for a phone that doesn’t anything that I need it to? Why can’t I just buy a piece of jewelry with the money? At least it will be classier and it won’t ring when I am eating.

It looks like Motorola is slightly slow and does not know what to do with themselves. They are making phones of all sorts and trying their luck at every little thing that comes our way. They hopped on to the slim-phone craze, the rotating-phone craze and every other passing craze that has ever infected the mobile handset industry.

True, so has every other major manufacturer but the ones that count have made phones that have been either iconic or well loved or extremely popular and functional. Some of them have been all of those things at once. Where’s Motorola’s piece of that pie?

Don’t get me wrong here though, Motorola is great at other things. They make great systems-on-a-chip and those are used all over the place in networking devices and similar. The phone industry is where they seem to be lacking in inspiration and general lack of focus and goal.

I’d say that Droid has been a great little project for them and we are likely to see good sales for Motorola thanks to it. So they should just pursue along those lines and make better phones that build up from Droid. The phone industry is going that way anyway and simple phones without these features will only become obsolete as time goes on. But Calgary is definitely not what I have in mind. You can do better Moto, we know you can.

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