Motorola
Motorola Cell Phones
North America's hottest phones, still not there yet
Motorola is a fortune 100 technology company and a veritable King Kong of communications. They're as well known for manufacturing processors and other parts as cell phones, cable boxes and other complete communications products.
Lately Motorola has been trying to make nice with beleaguered fans of multifunctional handsets. They've released a crop of new phones with some fancy names and are entering into distribution agreements with North American cellular service providers. The phones themselves, heralded as the iTunes phones are really quite weak. It's still better to buy an unlocked European phone on the internet and forget about some of the heavily marketed Motorola products.
It's no secret that in North America we get shafted when it comes to high tech handsets. What sets the European and Asian mobile phone markets apart from ours are lame offerings we get on this side of the ocean compared to what manufacturers regularly distribute in other continents. Part of it is our own fault, with our service providers offering limited digital network coverage in CDMA for years and showing no signs of going away. But today GSM is strong and fast becoming the standard wherever you live.
Motorola has been working to lead the way with a new high tech mobile handset that can operate as not only a phone but also a digital camera and MP3 player. But is it just marketing or are we really seeing strong products from Motorola worth our consideration? The ads are cute -- all those music stars packing themselves into a phone booth to advertise the Rokr, the so called iTunes phone.
Here's a conspiracy theory -- you heard it here first on GizmoCafe. Doesn't it seem like Motorola has been stuffing consonants together into curiously foreign, say even Finnish sounding names for their new products that purport to be multi-faceted media devices on the cutting edge of gadgetry? Take Motorola's new Oakley sunglasses/DAB player. It has the name Razrwire. That's a very macho sounding name. And that's because Razrwire is another try at MP3 playing sunglasses designed by Oakley which just failed to capture the imagination of any market in their first go around. The first incarnation of Oakely/DAB shades, called Thump, bombed so bad they can be found on any list of the top ten worst gadgets of '05. They should have called them Boom. So you'd have to be a tough customer to try repackaging Thump as Razrwire.
It's not just the Razr -- the ZR double consonant names abound. There is the Razr V3 and now Razr V3i, and who can forget the Rokr. Is Motorola trying to sound like they're foreign, perhaps European? What European languages spell names that way? Finnish makes use of the double consonant. Could Motorola be trying to come off as vaguely Finnish? Is this their way of unconsciously declaring submission to Finnish cell phone giant Nokia?
Motorola's cell phones are much like their PVR digital cable boxes. They work because they have leverage in North America but they're inferior to products by companies that specialize.
