It’s well known within the wireless industry that Motorola [NYSE:MOT] is perhaps on its last leg; with an abysmal balance sheet and few consumer successes of late, company board has given themsevles an ultimatum. If their next big product release isn’t a hit, they’ve decided to put Moto up for sale.
The potential savior-phone has been dubbed “Alexander,” and has been rumored to be a smartphone that could compete with the likes of the Blackberry Bold made by RIM [NASDAQ:RIMM]. This week a spy-shot of what is thought to be a prototype of the device was leaked on the Internet, and the reactions aren’t good.
The “Alexander” looks to be an ovular-shaped vertical slider phone with a fully QWERTY keyboard and a Pebl-like footprint. While the image is taken from the front, it’s pretty easy to see that the Alexander will be a thin phone despite its slider form factor. On the top half of the slider are a mid-sized screen, a directional button, and call and end buttons. On the screen is what appears to be Windows Mobile 6.1 (or perhaps 7).
While we don’t know much beyond appearances, those are usually enough in the mobile phone business to declare imminent success or failure. The uber-success of the Razr, which Motorola has yet to be able to reproduce, was not in the least attributable to its awful UI, but to its unbelievably sexy (at the time) form factor and its relatively large color screen. Looking at the Alexander is a yawn: nothing we haven’t seen before, done better elsewhere. If Motorola is really banking their company on this device, they’d better start packing.
