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MOTO posts

Motorola i680 gets FCC clearance

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 13th 2009 @ 9:03AM

If there's one thing we can promise when a Moto starts with "i" it's that it'll be an iDEN phone, so when you hear that there's an i680 in the FCC, you can pretty much gather what's going on here. Taking a look at the documentation, the newest push-to-talk clamshell out of Schaumburg looks way different than what we're used to -- but then again, so did the i9, so we can't say we're surprised to see 'em push the boundaries of iDEN design yet again. It's got a camera of unknown resolution and appears to be pretty well ruggedized (we'd expect no less from your average iDEN set) on account of that beefy thumbscrew holding the battery cover on around back, but it's hard to say when it's launching, so we're trying to keep our excitement level to a dull roar at this point. More as soon as we get it.

[Via Phone Scoop]

Motorola's MT710 OPhone for China makes us dream of Droids without keyboards

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 12th 2009 @ 10:10PM

While it's busy trying to rebuild market share on the backs of Android-powered devices in North America and Europe, Motorola's already got a bustling business in China, so it makes sense that they'd want to contribute some Google juice over there as well. That dovetails nicely with China Mobile's Android-based Open Mobile System -- which runs those so-called OPhones -- and Motorola has yet to bring an OPhone to market, so that's where this little beast appears poised to come into play. The MT710 is said to feature an 854 x 480 display clocking in at 3.7 inches and 3G support (using China Mobile's up-and-coming TD-SCDMA network), but beyond that, little is known; rumor has it that Motorola will intro a total of seven Android models in China over the next year, though, and this is clearly one of them. Shave three or four millimeters off the Droid's girth with this puppy, and count us in.

[Via PMP Today]

Motorola Droid torn down despite desperate cries of 'no disassemble'

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 11th 2009 @ 5:32PM

If you were thinking of tearing apart your own Droid, let us direct you first to this quote straight from the folks at phoneWreck: "no easy task." It seems that even finding some of the screws involved in holding the mess together was a problem, but at the end of the day, good old-fashioned human ingenuity prevailed over... well, other human ingenuity, and the phone fell asunder into the 16 pieces you see here. As you might imagine, there's a bit of industrial magic involved in fitting a full QWERTY slide into a package this tight -- but just as Moto was up to the challenge of putting it together, some dude with a little time on his hands was up to the challenge of asploding it. Needless to say, we won't be doing this to ours.

Motorola Quantico gets rugged for AWS CDMA

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 11th 2009 @ 3:30PM

Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint (well, Direct Connect anyway) have all gotten their fair shares of ruggedized Motorola love, but what about the regionals like MetroPCS? The answer to that might very well lie in the Quantico flip that was announced today, bearing support for 1700MHz CDMA in addition to 800 / 1900 with EV-DO. Besides mil-spec 810F compliance for resistance to environmental evils like water dunks, heat, and dust, the Quantico offers up a 1.3 megapixel camera (a little meager, if you ask us), stereo Bluetooth, and microSD expansion. Moto's putting nearly all of its weight behind Android right now, but alas, no Android here -- speaking of, whatever happened to the non-touch version of the platform? Anyhow, look for the phone to hit markets in this quarter; carrier partners have yet to be announced.

Update: Turns out US Cellular is already selling the Quantico despite Motorola's vague statement on availability. Thanks, everyone!

Analyst estimates 100,000 DROID smartphones sold in first weekend

by Darren Murph posted Nov 10th 2009 @ 9:12AM

The lines may have been subdued, but one way or another, it sounds as if Motorola managed to sell quite a few DROIDs over the weekend. According to analyst Mark McKechnie at Broadpoint AmTech, the outfit managed to move around 100,000 of 'em during the opening weekend, with most stores moving at least half of their original shipments. He also estimated that Moto would sell one million Android-based phones in Q4 2009 alone (which includes the CLIQ, obviously), and that he viewed the first few days as "encouraging." It's been a long, long while since we've been able to say this, but hey -- nice job, Motorola.

Verizon already prepping DROID and DROID Eris firmware updates?

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 10th 2009 @ 4:08AM

The last thing you want to hear about a few short days after a product's launch is a litany of issues plaguing devices in the field, but that's not quite what's going on here -- instead, this looks to be an extension of Verizon's well-known policy of testing the crap out of devices until manufacturers are practically crying uncle. The carrier has already generated long internal lists of issues on both the DROID and DROID Eris, it seems, with the leaked documents revealing some five pages for the Motorola product and seven -- yes, seven -- for the HTC one; the good news is that they're all slated to be fixed in one of two firmware updates slated for December and January windows. Again, knowing Verizon, these firmware updates could very well get stuck in the testing lab for another six years, but we'll keep our hopes skyward.

Read - DROID
Read - DROID Eris

Motorola Motus gets FCC approval, Sholes Tablet looking legit

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 9th 2009 @ 6:11PM

Whenever a Moto with triband HSPA hits the FCC, we're naturally going to end up scouring the documentation -- what can we say, it's in our blood -- and today we've found a model claiming to be the rumored Motus. As a refresher, this is a device we'd heard would rock the Android midrange with a 5 megapixel AF cam, 3.1-inch QVGA display, and HSPA for a Q1 '10 release, so it's not much more than a tweaked CLIQ as far as we're concerned -- but the big news here might actually be that the Motus filing adds legitimacy to the leaked roadmap where we'd originally heard of it. That document made mention of a "Sholes Tablet" that takes the already-high-end DROID / MILESTONE further upmarket with an 8 megapixel cam and xenon flash, and as you can imagine, we'll be listening to our friends at the FCC pretty intently over the next few weeks to see if we can catch that one sliding through.

PSA: Sears charging $50 less for new DROID activations than Verizon

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 6th 2009 @ 11:14AM

If you walk into a Verizon store today and pick up a DROID, you'll be out $300 (before tax) out of pocket, then you'll twiddle your thumbs for a few weeks while you wait for some mysterious PO box in Texas to send you your $100 rebate on a debit card. Wouldn't you rather just pay $200 upfront? Or better yet, $150? Sears -- which, we have to admit, we didn't know sold phones -- is charging just $150 without a rebate for the DROID today, a full $50 less than Big Red proper with rebate. We don't know how good these guys are with customer service (Simplexity is running the store on Sears' behalf, it seems), but truth be told, we can deal with a little incompetency for $50.

[Via I4U]

DROID mania sweeps the nation, so to speak

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 6th 2009 @ 9:19AM

It appears that last night's midnight opening in Manhattan went off like gangbusters, but the situation across the country is a little more subdued this morning with seemingly short lines and easy access to DROIDs at every location we've visited. We won't put out a number, but we can confirm that several Engadget editors have taken the plunge today -- and if riffraff like us can waltz into the store and get them, you should certainly be able to. Good luck being assimilated out there today, and be sure to post pictures of your experience in comments (up above we've got San Francisco's first buyer courtesy of Ross Miller, and after the break, you can live it up with the good folks of Albany as they were paid a visit by Tim Stevens).

Continue reading DROID mania sweeps the nation, so to speak

Canceled Motorola RAZR3 reemerges as KLASSIC in South Korea

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 5th 2009 @ 4:29AM

When the bulk of your business suddenly shifts virtually all of its marketing and engineering resources to Android, certain things are bound to fall through the cracks -- take the "Ruby," for example, once said to be the fallen would-be successor to the RAZR 2. We guess Moto got far enough along on engineering with this one that they figured they'd toss it over to one of its lower-volume markets rather than canning it altogether, though, because the higher-end flip has reemerged in South Korea as the KLASSIC. For anyone who keeps track of these sorts of stats, that's exactly three more letters than the typical Moto model name has, but the phone breaks all sorts of rules -- after all, it combines an old-school 2G radio (which in operator SKT's case, means CDMA) with a relatively fresh 5 megapixel cam, not unlike the ZN5. There's no word on a release outside South Korea at this point, but frankly, we're pretty sure the DROID would eat it anyhow.

[Via AVING]

Motorola DROID's built-in apps don't have multitouch support, third-party stuff is another story

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 4th 2009 @ 5:05AM

Turns out that the DROID does support multitouch after all -- it's just not as baked as the MILESTONE's, and it's certainly not the kind you'll see out of the box. The DROID's European cousin features multitouch right in the phone's core software load (most notably pinch-and-zoom in the browser, which we've seen demoed on video) whereas the DROID itself still features multitouch capability in APIs but doesn't expose it through any built-in app. Translation: the apps you use every day -- Google Maps and the browser, chiefly -- get left out in the cold for some reason that neither Google nor Motorola (nor Verizon) have thus far been willing to adequately justify. Where you can experience the magic of pinch-and-zoom is in third-party apps written to take advantage of Android 2.0's new APIs (Phandroid demos it on a fresh version of Picsay, for instance), but at the end of the day, that's a consolation prize -- we still want a spin-free explanation of why this was all turned off for the base apps. Follow the break for video of Picsay's support for the good stuff in action.

[Image via mobile-review]

Continue reading Motorola DROID's built-in apps don't have multitouch support, third-party stuff is another story

Verizon announces early store openings for DROID launch

by Darren Murph posted Nov 3rd 2009 @ 1:05PM

We'd already heard through the grapevine that select Verizon Wireless stores would be cracking their doors open early to deal with the presumed flood of ~~consumers~~ "Humans" eager to snap up the first-ever Android 2.0 device, and now the carrier has come right out with the official details. We're told that "many" of its over 2,000 retail locations will open at either 7AM or 8AM local time to field orders for the DROID, though VZW mall stores will all open at their regular time. You should check with your local store to see exactly when they'll open, and while we can't guarantee it, we'd guess that having an Android-related tattoo on your person is a good way to get VIP treatment once you arrive on scene. Or, you know, you could just get your Best Buy pre-order in now and save $100 up front by dodging the mail-in rebate.

Bug in Motorola CLIQ's OpenGL implementation breaks a few games

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 3rd 2009 @ 9:29AM

If you've run into trouble trying to load up Hexage's Buka or Totemo on your CLIQ, you're not alone -- it seems that some wonky handling of a few OpenGL API calls on Motorola's first Android device are causing heartache for users and developers alike. It's not clear how many apps in total make use of the calls, but we'd imagine they're in line to be fixed -- and thanks to the CLIQ's support for over-the-air updates, we're hoping those fixes come sooner rather than later. In the meantime, we suppose that DROID's always an option, right?

[Via I4U and Android and Me]

Motorola MILESTONE does what DROIDon't

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 2nd 2009 @ 7:14PM

We've already seen the MILESTONE showing off multitouch capability, something the DROID clearly lacks in the States despite the fact that Android 2.0 rocks kernel support for it -- and now we've got another smoking gun: the official spec sheet. A quick glance at Motorola's tech specs for the Euro-flavored handset lists "pinch and zoom" as an interface feature, so yeah, it looks like this'll be in the shipping firmware. There's speculation out there that Apple was somehow involved in making sure that multitouch "fell" down a flight of stairs before reaching US-bound Android devices, but really, it's anyone's guess what's going on here -- and Moto's official statement isn't helping much:

"We work very closely with our carriers and partners to deliver differentiated consumer experiences on our mobile devices. At times, similar devices come to market with different features, depending on the region, carrier preferences and consumer needs."

Nor is Google's:

"The Android 2.0 framework includes support for multi-touch. As with other platform technologies, such as the text-to-speech engine, carriers and OEMs can choose to implement it."

So let the speculation -- and the firmware hacking -- begin.

[Via Gearlog, image via mobile-review]

Motorola CLIQ lands in T-Mobile USA stores today

by Darren Murph posted Nov 2nd 2009 @ 2:33PM

Motorola's Android-laden CLIQ has been available to existing T-Mobile USA users for a hot minute now, but not until today has the handset been widely available to all that care to take notice. Of course, the proper launch has been dampened somewhat by the emergence of the DROID (alongside Android 2.0), but hey, MOTOBLUR ain't nuthin' to scoff at, right? Feel free to locate your nearest T-Mob retail location, waltz in with $199.99 and get yours today.