Alright Motorola, I’ve got to hand it to you. After seeing the Morrison rock that DayGlo Playskool look (and let’s not forget that hideous black and purple Rival), we were all a little worried that all you guys had forgotten all about a little concept called “subtlety”. Alas, as it turns out, our fears were misplaced: pictures of Motorola’s latest (and classiest) Android to date have been leaked, and boy are they a sight to behold.
Thanks to the guys over at Motofan.ru, we can now see that none of the design cues that characterized the Morrison have made it over to the new device, codenamed “Sholes”. Gone are the gaudy colors and rounded edges; the Sholes sports a more streamlined, industrial aesthetic. Something about the phone’s shape is reminiscent of the classic RAZR, which isn’t exactly out of left field since Motorola spent the last five years running the RAZR’s design into the ground.
Appearance aside, the Sholes looks to bring a lot to the table feature wise. Among other things, the Sholes sports:
- a 3.7 inch touch display, running at 480 x 854
- 256 MB of RAM
- 512 MB of storage (expandable up to 16 GB)
- 5 MP camera with autofocus
- Integrated GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth 2.0
From what the Motofans have dug up, the Sholes will be (after a quick name change, we’re assuming) headed to Verizon for its stateside release. What’s really interesting is when the launch is supposedly set to go down: they have it pegged for October 9th, just shy of the possible U.S. release date of HTC’s Hero for Sprint. It looks like the Summer Smartphone Wars may be spilling over into the fall, but hey- we’re certainly not complaining about it.
Mighty slick…perhaps Motorola might survive yet.
very nice i think you may be right SS
Is the screen made of plastic, with flexible “buttons” or “clicky regions” at the bottom of the screen? Will the metallic coating peel from the buttons and the bezel? Will the “M” logo or anything else light up uninvited? I am a bit skeptical because Motorola tends to come up with tacky designs that are both superficial and prone to scratching and peeling. Also, while I bet the keyboard feels nice, I prefer to have the keyboard below the alphanumeric characters. The bottom of the phone where the microphone is looks sort of out of place. And who knows what kind of flimsy panel covers the battery.
Great specs though.
I have a Motorola Q9h which runs well for a windows mobile device of its generation. But it looks like it was designed in a few hours, looks like crap.