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Motorola SCPL in the wild
Egads, could it be? Journeying a long, thorny path from executive teaser to fanboy mockup to reality, the mythical Motorola SCPL has finally shown up in the hands of someone who isn't a suit-wearing Moto employee. Bearing a fairly strong familial resemblance to the ultra low-end MOTOFONE, Boy Genius tells us that the SCPL is insanely thin -- thinner than the RAZR 2 -- and sports a QVGA display, 2 megapixel cam, quadband GSM, and JUIX. Missing from the specs are 3G data and any sort of memory expansion, but if Moto can get this one out the door with a non-bank breaking sticker price, they may have a winner they desperately need.
Motorola MOTOFONE F3 gets by FCC
The FCC is many things to many people, but for us, it's a library and an informant. In its latter capacity, the agency has scooped literally dozens upon dozens of phones for us; in its former, it serves as one of the most comprehensive sources of mobile phone user's manuals on the 'net. They're putting on their starched, three-piece suits and playing their librarian role this time around, releasing a cornucopia of PDFs relating to Motorola's low-cost MOTOFONE F3. The draft manual is a breath of fresh air for the manual haters among us -- we know who you are -- if it carries through to production in its current form, bearing just 10 (yes, ten) panels of important information on what appears to be a foldable pamphlet. Ultra low-end or not, we have to admit an irrational excitement is building around Engadget HQ to play around with this thing -- especially if the brief documentation suggests it's going to take like 90 seconds to learn.
Official Motorola SLDR and SCPL pics? Probably not.
When news hit our desks today that so-called "official" pictures of a Motorola SLDR and SCPL were floating around the 'nets, our skepticism was almost immediate. Why would Moto undercut the upcoming release of its RIZR slider with a technologically superior (yet less creatively named) sibling? Why would they officially identify this candybar simply as "SCPL" after previously revealing that the cost-sensitive MOTOFONE was, in fact, the SCPL -- or at least a member of a newly-coined SCPL series? Why do the SCPL and SLDR seem so out of proportion to one another? (Look after the break to see what we mean.) Why do the d-pads and displays look vaguely suspicious? Why is the SCPL's background a recolored version of the ROKR E2's? Add in the fact that Motorola's branding and design DNA are nearly as easy to fake as Apple's, and needless to say, it takes a little more than a couple funky shots to get us to buy that Moto -- with possibly the slowest-changing product line of the major manufacturers -- would drop two utterly new models in a single day with this little fanfare. It was a HowardForums thread, though, that finally sealed the deal for us with a poster noting that the supposed SLDR shares the same display image as one of the KRZR's original press shots. Now, if our good friends at Motorola HQ would like to prove us wrong, well... you know where to send the phones, guys; but in the meantime, consider these things no more real than a US release of the MPx.Read - NewMobileRead - HowardForums[Thanks, Brad]
Hands-on with Motorola MOTOFONE F3
Who knew going back to segmented displays on handsets was such a good idea? No, seriously -- check out the picture, it looks pretty nifty in the flesh. Mobile Burn was equally impressed in their up-close-and-personal look at Moto's MOTOFONE F3, their newest low-cost handset for emerging markets, saying that the screen actually reminded them a lot of an Etch-a-Sketch. With a large text readout and voice prompting, they were equally impressed with the phone's foolproof simplicity, suggesting this might be a great device for the very young and old in, uh, emerged markets as well. We'll reserve final judgment for when we can get our hands on an F3 ourselves, but we'd like to cautiously offer Moto congratulations for getting us unusually worked up over an extremely simple phone.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Motorola's 9mm MOTOFONE
Eat your heart out, Samsung. Well, not really, since Motorola's new MOTOFONE is not only 2.1mm thicker than Samsung's current record holding X820, but also comes up quite short in the features department. Instead the new MOTOFONE, coming in GSM and CDMA flavors at a svelte 0.35-inches, is targeting first time wireless users, prepaid buyers, and developing countries. Luckily, while Moto was weeding out those "nonessentials" like a camera, MP3 playback and a color screen (The MOTOFONE has instead an electrophoretic display with similarities to e-paper) they managed to lose that unsightly hump Samsung slapped onto the X820. Motorola's thinnest phone does include some niceties beyond size, like local language voice prompts for ease of use, dust and sun resistance, and "extended" battery life. There's no word on price or a release date, but we're sure we can find enough change in our couch for whenever it does come around. Phone Scoop is calling this unit part of Motorola's "Scalpel" platform, of which the rumored SCPL should be a bit more of an exciting member.[Via Phone Scoop; thanks everyone]
Motorola Capri, a.k.a. the RAZR slider, previewed
The guys over at PhoneScoop have sure made the site live up to its name today: not only did they get some serious hands-on time with Motorola's upcoming RAZR slider -- codenamed Capri -- they also got to preview the next version of Moto's much-maligned Synergy UI that will show up in such models as the Canary and the SCPL. At least on paper, the Capri seems to offer a very compelling feature set that will probably attract anyone into the RAZR lifestyle- you're getting a model only slightly thicker and heavier than its clamshell counterpart, but which sports a 2.0 megapixel camera, A2DP-capable Bluetooth, and what sounds like a greatly improved user interface. Especially noteworthy in the overhauled Synergy is an address book that seems to work much more intuitively than past iterations (remember the one on the StarTAC?), allowing you to organize entries by name and search for contacts using multiple letters. Although Phone Scoop was only testing a pre-production model, they have identified some potential problems to watch out for on the final version, such as the unusually crappy quality of what should be a decent camera, and most importantly, a spring-assisted slider that's difficult to activate due to the raised antenna bulge so familiar to RAZR owners. Click on if you want to peep a few more snaps, but you're really doing yourself a disservice if you don't head over to PhoneScoop for the full gallery and a very thorough write-up...
Fanboy specs, drawings emerge for Motorola SCPL
What's a lazy Friday afternoon without a bit of completely unsubstantiated rumor mongering? Sure, it's possible that Ed Zander himself wrote this SCPL mockup on a napkin over a recent lunch, but we're thinking it more likely the doings of a fanboy with too much time on his hands. Anyways, the specs are as set above: 0.2-inches thick (compared to the 0.27-inch chubster X820 from Samsung),QVGA display, 512MB flash memory, microSD slot, 3.5mm headphone jack, FM radio (pushing it), Bluetooth 2.0 and a titanium-alloy build. We'd be pretty happy with about half of that, but we're sure this won't be the last savory rumor to drool over before we find out for reals.
Motorola exec reveals next-gen slimphone: the SCPL
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]
