PDA-1

One of the things about the gadget-driven industry is that manufacturers can never be too early in releasing it products.

We cannot recall exactly when is it that Motorola faded from the mobile phone races - probably right after they released and piggy-backed (for way too long) on the popularity of its flip phones back in early 90’s. Come 2000, they fought back valiantly with some measure of success with the release of a plethora of funky-looking phones (we aren’t too sure about their technical capabilities though.)

Now they have decided to enter the Smartphone race, and they sure came in with a bang with the MPx200. The model was well-received even without the latest Windows Mobile for Smartphone OS powering it, and Motorola promised more with news of the MPx, MPx100, and MPx220. Wonderful!

The question now is: Has Motorola fumbled and went the way of the 90’s again? To-date, the MPx release date has been pushed back more times than we’d even care to record, and the MPx100 got canned because Moto thinks that it’d jeopardize the sale of its expected next-hotseller: the MPx220. Still … where’s the MPx220? It’s release has been pushed back too; and a heckuva lot more often that the MPx.

In the meantime, HTC (High Tech Corporation, Taiwan) - the powerhouse OEM of multiple best-seller PDAs and PDAphones - is all too eager to step up to the Smartphone plate … and delivers; as surefootedly as they always had been. They conquered the PDA battlefield with the runaway-success, HP branded 1900 and 4000 Series PDAs and in PDAphones with the impressive array of O2/T-Mobile/Qtek/iMate branded models. They are smack right in the Smartphone arena with the now-revered-over-Motorola model, the Orange/iMate/Qtek branded model codenamed Typhoon.

Why? While some would say that the Typhoon has a superior feature set and performance over the MPx220 - the resounding answer is that it just plain came into the market-for-sale faster. It is now being sold by Orange in Europe as the C500, and there are reports that it’ll be in the US early September; some say perhaps end-August even.

Where are you now, Motorola? Perhaps it should quit this market too?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2004 and is filed under Smartphones, Windows Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.