Having struggled since they released the extremely popular Razr years ago, Motorola is still trying to regain it"s position at the top of the heap as it stands toe to toe with some very stiff competition in the mobile phone market. The company is banking on a few new devices, devices that eschew the tired designs of the past, to accomplish this lofty feat.
In comes the Motosurf A3100 Windows Mobile device. Formerly referred to as the Attila, the A3100 features a 2.8" QVGA touch screen with 3G (HSDPA 7.2 850/1900/2100) and WiFi connectivity. You"ll also be able to navigate the, sometimes finger unfriendly, Windows Mobile interface with the included omnidirectional trackball. Behind the somewhat vanilla facade, you"ll find an even more lackluster 256MB of storage space and 128MB of RAM. To make up for the lack of internal storage, though, the A3100 features a MicroSD slot with support for cards up to 32GB in size. To round it all off, there"s the usual GPS and Bluetooth 2.0 included.
If you thought the hardware was a bit lacking, the software isn"t much better, though there are some saving graces. Besides the usual Windows Mobile suite of applications such as Outlook and Pocket Internet Explorer, the A3100 will try to spice things up a bit with Opera Mobile 9.5 and custom applications that give you access to both Facebook and YouTube. The Windows Mobile home screen has also been replaced with a custom built Motorola home screen.
If you somehow find yourself excited about the A3100, you can expect to see it hit "multiple regions, including Asia and Latin America" in Q1 2009. For the rest of us: Let"s hope Motorola has something more impressive and modern up their sleeves.