One Hit, One Miss from Motorola

This week we're hearing about more mobile phones as companies announce their new handsets for North America at CTIA.
Motorola launched four phones, but only two of them are really new. Worse yet, although the phones are VERY different,
they have practically the same name. Good  luck remembering which is which.

If this were a buddy cop movie, the A840 would play the good cop. Building on the continually delayed V600 form factor, the A840 is packed with an amazing set of features for a dual band (900/1800) GSM phone — it's got Bluetooth, a 1.2 megapixel camera and a T-Flash memory card expansion slot — but the kicker is that the phone is also a dual band CDMA phone (800/1900) so you can use it here in the States and then roam with GSM overseas. It looks good, it's feature packed, and it really should work just about everywhere. What more can you ask for?

The A845 (pictured), well, is just not quite as impressive, and could easily play the bad cop in my movie because it has the shape (and very nearly the size) of a baseball bat. The A845 will be one of the first 3G phones for the US, and is exactly like its cousin on Britain's 3 network, the A835, except that it uses 1900MHz for 3G. Because it's so unwieldy, it hasn't sold well abroad, and we don't think a phone you can't fit in your pocket (it literally is THAT big) will sell any better over here.