We don't know whether he was pushed out or left of his own accord, but the news has just hit the wires that Ron Garriques is out as the head of Motorola's mobile devices business. It's not totally shocking to see a change of leadership, Moto's cellphone unit has definitely been through some rough times lately. Profits have fallen as the company struggles to followup the success of the RAZR and they recently announced that they were laying off 3500 employees. Whatever happens, hopefully whoever succeeds him (Ray Roman, senior vice president, global sales, and Terry Vega, senior vice president, global devices, are filling in for now) will recognize that the cellphone game is way too competitive these days to think that rolling out the RAZR in new colors is an acceptable substitute for innovation.

UPDATE: He's off to Dell to head up their Global Consumer Group.

Talk about a tease: Motorola's head honcho for cellphones, Ron Garriques, revealed the existence of an upcoming handset called the SCPL (that's scalpel, in case the lack of vowels made it unclear) during a recent company investment conference -- but kept all the important details to himself. All that's known about the SCPL (which we hope no one will mistake for the surgical tool pictured here), other than the obvious fact that it will be quite slim, is that it will sport five features that promise to set it apart from the pack -- which we'll take to mean WiMax, GPS, 3CCD HD camcorder, 30GB hard drive, and probably a DirecTV dish as well. At this point, we can't even say for sure that the SCPL is not the same as the supposed RAZR 2, or "Canary," that's been fluttering around recently, but whatever they're working on, we'll have to wait until next year to get our hands on one.

[Thanks, Shamste]