The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Motorola set to launch pen-driven Symbian phone

And to announce an MS deal. Grief...

  • print
  • alert

Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner

Motorola's remarkable and protracted silence on the subject of Symbian phones has been broken at last - the company does have one, the A920, and a serious and interesting bid it looks too. The documentation on the unit filed with the FCC (which frequently hosts useful pictures of products you hadn't previously heard of) shows a 3G device which includes support for the US 1900 GSM standard, which may suggest the company will aim it at the US market first. But on the other hand, that 3 on the front does kind of look like a Hutchison one, doesn't it?

But questions, questions. It has a large screen with buttons above and below, which means it may be intended to act as a games-playing device in landscape mode. It has a video camera, which sort of also fits with youth, but is virtually compulsory these days anyway. What, though, is that thing over on the left of the rear view that looks like it slots in?

This and the suspicious lack of a keyboard does seem to point inexorably to a stylus phone. UIQ? Register sources suggest that this almost certainly is not the case, and that Motorola will - as it tends to - be using something of its own devising. And the A920 will be one of the few Symbian OS 7.0 phones, joining the P800 and the BenQ we mentioned yesterday. Whatever, it does look like we have a serious bid at last from the slower moving one of the founding Symbian partners.

But that's apparently not the last of it. It seems likely that the disruptive Motorola-Microsoft announcement that didn't happen at GSM World last month is now due for next Tuesday. We're told it's likely to be an HTC design, rather than anything home grown, so that won't necessarily signal a deep and long-term commitment to Redmond. But we'll still then have Linux, Symbian and Microsoft platforms from Motorola. Maybe the company was offended by the way the Linux move was widely-hailed as a coherent, logical and viable strategy, at last. ®

Those nice FCC pictures:
External
Internal

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

More from The Register

 breaking news
UK telcos chuck another £1m at online child abuse watchdog
Web enforcers IWF gain power to seek and destroy illegal content
 breaking news
Pttow! Ofcom kicks hams out of MoD bands
Geet off my land, you, you ... 'secondary user'
 breaking news
Now you can use your phone instead of your wallet at the ATM, too
Blimey, these little paper towels out of the vending machine are really expensive
 breaking news
UK.gov's £530m bumpkin broadband rollout: 'Train crash waiting to happen'
Whitehall whispers of damning watchdog report next month
Google launches broadband balloons, radio astronomy frets
A careless Loon could blind the square kilometre array
 breaking news
MySpace zaps millions of teens' tearful rants, causes wave of angst
'Your crappy redesign SUCKS, I wanna read my blogs' screech users
 breaking news
Microsoft Office 365 on iPhone NOW: No, we're not making this up
Word, Excel, Powerpoint for your pocket-stroker
Increased cell phone coverage tied to uptick in African violence
'Significantly and substantially increases the probability of violent conflict'
 breaking news