PRESS RELEASE: MOTOBLUR™ Debuts in Canada

PRESS RELEASE: MOTOBLUR™ Debuts in Canada – Say Hello to the First Phones with Social Skills
Only MOTOBLUR organizes all your messages from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter along with your emails and texts, and streams them to a single live widget for immediate reply – right from the home screen

March 03, 2010

TORONTO, Ont. — March 3, 2010 — Motorola Canada today announced that MOTOBLURTM, its revolutionary social service for Android-powered devices, is coming to Canada with all three national wireless carriers in the first half of 2010.

MOTOBLUR is the only solution to sync all your friends, posts, feeds, messages, e-mails, photos and much more—from sources such as Facebook®, Twitter®, MySpace, Gmail™, Yahoo! and work email—with continuous updates, automatically delivering them to your home screen for immediate reply. MOTOBLUR delivers these updates in easy-to-view streams, so there is no need to switch between different mobile applications to keep up with the latest content, allowing you to spend less time managing your life and more time living it.

“We are thrilled to be bringing Canadians three unique MOTOBLUR handsets with all the major wireless carriers,” said Rick Gadd, Vice President and Sales General Manager, Mobile Devices, Motorola Canada. “With MOTOBLUR, we are differentiating the Android experience and delivering phones that are truly instinctive and socially smart.”

Life: Organized, Streamed and Delivered
Only MOTOBLUR automatically delivers conversation threads, friend updates, stories, links, photos and more, to live widgets on your home screen for immediate reply:

Happenings: View your social site updates in one spot with the live Happenings application. Every friend feed, status update, wall post, bulletin and photo upload is automatically delivered and ready for immediate reply, anyway you like.
Messages: Quickly scroll through the Messages application for a snapshot of current work or personal emails, social site messages, and texts, and view messages all together in the universal inbox or separately by source.
Social Status: Blast your status right from the home screen and even save time by updating your status to one or all your social networks at once.
News Feeds: Keep track of your favorite news feeds, sports scores or even celebrity gossip without leaving the home screen.
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Palm and Motorola Call it Quits on Windows Mobile

This past week word broken that both Palm and Motorola would stop using Windows Mobile on their handheld devices. That can’t be good news for Microsoft as they struggle to regain market and mind share as new mobile operating systems are moving in quickly. But is really all doom and gloom? Sure, it’s never good to lose customers to the competition, but did Palm and Moto really bring that much to Windows Mobile?

With all the handsets created by both Palm and Moto, only 1 device ever made Microsoft’s million plus sellers list – only 1. That device was Motorola’s Q, a ground breaking device for its time, even if it had a hard time making it through a day on a charge. Just like the RAZR, Moto has tried to recapture their success with similar styled follow-up devices without much luck.

As for Palm, their users a very loyal and typically love their handhelds. However, Palm was never able to get their popular Treo handsets into the million plus sellers club. It’s no surprise that once Palm was able to release their new, long awaited follow-up to the Palm OS, dubbed the WebOS that they would toss in the towel on Windows Mobile. The new Palm Pre running the WebOS is getting mediocre reviews on the street, but Palm.afford to continue working with 2 mobile operating systems. They need to curb the cash flow and cutting the mobile license fee that Microsoft asking for Windows Mobile is one sure fire way to save a little money in the short term. Can they last purely on their WebOS? We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

For me, I’m more looking forward to what Samsung, HTC, HP, etc… are going to release next, and what LG is going to bring to the table when they get their first devices out of the gate later this year.

Top Selling Windows Mobile Devices of All Time

During the Windows Mobile talk at CntrStg @ CES, Greg Sullivan mentioned that there are 11 phones that have sold in excess of 1 million units. That’s a pretty impressive achievement. I was curious to know more about these 11 devices. Like, how many are touch screen vs non-touch screen? And what manufacturers have made the best selling devices.  I’m sure you can guess some of the devices and companies that made it to the list.  But I wanted to know them all.  Thankfully, Greg provided me with a list of all the devices that have reached the 1 Million+ milestone.

The following list is in no particular order.  Other than some minor formatting changes, it’s exactly how I received it.

• Samsung Omnia (SGH-i900/908/SCH-i910/M490)
• Samsung Blackjack II (SGH-i617)
• Samsung Blackjack (SGH-i607/600)
• Motorola Q
• HTC Touch Diamond (Diamond/Diamond-C)
• Audiovox SMT 5600 (HTC)
• HTC Dash (Excalibur)
• HTC xv6800  (Titan)
• HTC TyTN II (Tilt/Kaiser)
• HTC Touch (Elf/Vogue)
• HTC P800W (Artemis)

There’s a total of 4 different manufacturers on the list, 3 if you consider that the Audiovox device was made by HTC.  Of the top 11 best selling Windows Mobile devices, 7 are from HTC including the Audiovox device, 3 from Samsung and 1 from Motorola. Further, there are 6 Windows Mobile Pro devices (touch screen) and 5 Windows Mobile Standard (non-touch) devices. And of those non-touch screen devices, 4 out of 5 are messenger style devices – that’s devices with a front facing QWERTY. Another interesting fact is that 7 out of 11, or just over 63% of these devices have a QWERTY on them. 

I really have to wonder if the current trend by carriers and manufacturers to focus on iPhone like devices is such a smart move. With QWERTY being so predominate on the top selling devices, and over 45% of the top selling devices are non-touch screen, there is a definite trend of successful non-iphone like devices. I hope the manufacturers and carriers can see past the iPhone and work towards being original and different once again.

Motorola Quietly Announces New Windows Mobile Devices at CES

During CES Motorola quietly rolled out 2 new Windows Mobile devices – 1 touch screen and 1 non-touch screen device. I was taking a short walk across the show floor when I spotted some devices in the Motorola booth. Upon closer examination, I realized that these are new Windows Mobile devices. I asked the Motorola rep when these where released and was told that the devices had been announced here at CES. Oddly enough, I haven’t seen any talk or coverage of these devices. I shouldn’t be surprised, Moto could have done more to get the word and buzz going. In fact, they should have come out to CntrStg and announced the devices directly to mobile focused bloggers. Anyway…

The first device is a oval touch screen device with a new interface on top of the professional version of Windows Mobile. Unfortunately, my pictures of this device didn’t turn out very well. You’ll have to suffer with this image that I clipped from the Moto site. The A3100 or Moto Surf has a cool little trackball for navigation, which actually works very well. I really like the use of these little trackballs on mobile devices. The Surf is a quad-band GSM phone with a 3MP camera, Windows Mobile 6.1, 256MB Flash, 128MB RAM, and a nice standby time of 12 days!

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Where Are All the Flipping Smartphones?

When you look around at the type of mobile phone that the average person is using you’ll notice that the majority of phones are flip based. I’m talking about the average person like your mother, Aunt, Cousin, Grandparents, etc… Not the techno-geeks or early adapters. Just the average Joe and their phone. They’re typically cheap flip based devices that offer nothing more than the ability to make phone calls and send some text messages.

So what am I getting at? Well, there is a demand for the flip form factor. There’s no question that there are a number of dumb flip phones on the market today. But where are all the smart ones? RIM recently announced a new BlackBerry device to their line-up, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip. None of the other smartphone manufacturers have a flip phone in their product lineup. HTC did have that SmartFlip device, which was a pretty nice first attempt at making a flip phone. Especially if you had the Cingular version with more memory and a larger battery. Before that, we had Motorola, who made 2 different flip based smartphones – the MPX 200 and 220. While the 220 was plagued with problems, both devices where extremely popular for their time. That’s it for the Windows Mobile camp. Sony Ericsson had that P990 Symbian based device a number of years back. However, that wasn’t really a flip phone. It was more a PDA with a protector that covered the keyboard. And Nokia has the Communicator device, but that’s not a flip phone, it’s more of a clamshell. You can still make and answer calls without flipping the phone open. You only need open the phone to use the keyboard. Aside from the Communicator, Nokia does have a Series 60 flip phone – the N76. However, the N76 is already 2 years old.

It certainly looks like all the major manufacturers are ignoring this market segment, except for RIM. I don’t understand why these companies are avoiding such a popular form-factor. There’s no doubt that people like the flip design, so why not offer more smartphone devices with it? I can understand that there is some concern because of the hinge and the risk of that breaking, but I think the majority of manufacturers have been able to make solid hinges that don’t easily break.

The only other concern that I can think of is that the form factor doesn’t allow for easy text entry. Most standard flip phones are using T9 with the standard 12 key layout. Smartphone users tend to want a full QWERTY layout. While this could be hard with the traditional flip phone, I can’t imagine it being a show stopper. I actually prefer the landscape screen found on most messenger style devices over the portrait screen found on the typical flip phone. Combine the full QWERTY with the landscape screen and you’ll have a wider flip phone than most. Nothing’s wrong with that. The option is to use the portrait screen with a SureType-like keyboard. This would provide the traditional flip form factor.

I can’t imagine any other reasons on why this design hasn’t happened yet. I’m growing sick of the traditional smartphone designs. It’s time for a change, let’s see if any manufacturer is willing to step up to the table.

Motorola Accuses RIM of Poaching Employees

It seems like Motorola is having a pretty hard time as of late. Not only are the feeling the pressure of increased competition in the mobile phone space, but now they are also having to deal with Research In Motion poaching key employees. Motorola claims that RIM has targeted 40 employees who can’t work for a competitor without revealing corporate / trade secrets. It’s expected that these employees are working on a new touch screen mobile device for RIM, code-named Thunder.

When it comes to mobile devices, Motorola has 2 lines, consumer and industrial. The consumer line tends to be non-touch screen based. But the industrial line, better known as Symbol, is a full blown ruggedized device running Windows Mobile/CE and is touch screen enabled. So, if RIM is poaching employees for use on their touch screen device, does that mean we can expect a RIM based Windows Mobile-based device?

[Source]