[Jason Dunn]

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008...nder-live-shot/

That blurry photo of a photo of a phone is apparently the Motorola Alexander. There were some rumours about it last month, but as usual with rumours they turned out to be a little off (Symbian OS? Nah). If this photo is accurate, we're looking at a Windows Mobile operating system on the Motorola Alexander. It's supposed to come out in Q4 of this year, so Windows Mobile 6.1 makes sense. The camera is supposed to be between five and eight megapixels, which means you'll probably get really high-resolution crappy-looking blurry photos. Honestly, I've never seen a camera on a Windows Mobile phone that's impressed me even in the slightest.

GPS is also included, and hopefully it's real GPS and not just aGPS. No word on the processor or the storage (there'd better be a microSD slot on there!) but there's supposedly an NVIDIA GPU capable of 3D hardware acceleration...which could prove to be interesting. It's hard to tell from the photo, but this looks fairly thin - which would be a bit unusual for a slider phone.

What do you think? Does this phone appeal to you based on what we think we know about it so far?

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008...nder-live-shot/

That blurry photo of a photo of a phone is apparently the Motorola Alexander. There were some rumours about it last month, but as usual with rumours they turned out to be a little off (Symbian OS? Nah). If this photo is accurate, we're looking at a Windows Mobile operating system on the Motorola Alexander. It's supposed to come out in Q4 of this year, so Windows Mobile 6.1 makes sense. The camera is supposed to be between five and eight megapixels, which means you'll probably get really high-resolution crappy-looking blurry photos. Honestly, I've never seen a camera on a Windows Mobile phone that's impressed me even in the slightest.

GPS is also included, and hopefully it's real GPS and not just aGPS. No word on the processor or the storage (there'd better be a microSD slot on there!) but there's supposedly an NVIDIA GPU capable of 3D hardware acceleration...which could prove to be interesting. It's hard to tell from the photo, but this looks fairly thin - which would be a bit unusual for a slider phone.

What do you think? Does this phone appeal to you based on what we think we know about it so far?

[Rocco Augusto]

I like it. The whole design looks kind of like a kids toy, but it is interesting. Then again, I guess anything they release Smartphone wise that doesn't look like a Q9 is a plus in my book

[Kacey Green]

I thought aGPS is real GPS with assistance from the carriers' location servers.

[Cattle-Dog]

It seems to have tipped the balance of style and function too far towards style, in my oppinion. I look at it and cannot help but to see, if Paris Hilton owned a Windows Mobile... Okay, maybe that is going too far, but that keyboard looks painful.

As far as camera's go, I'd really wish they would stop focusing (no pun intended) on megapixles and go back to lower resolution and higher image quality. More MP's on such a small die, means very small photodiodes (individual light receptors on the imager), which means very low signal to noise ratios. So feed in poorly focused light, through a plastic lens, onto an extremely noisy sensor with poor dynamic range and we have the makings for really bad pictures.

I don't know about you, but I don't take family portraits or even vacation photo's with my phone. It's a novelty feature that I use primarlily to either create contact photos or to send an MMS. So a low noise, much sharper, 1 MP camera would suite me just fine. I seriously doubt that the effective resolution is any higher than that on 95% of phones out there anyway.

/cell phone camera rant off

I am curious what they are going to do with a 3d accelerator on a non-touch phone. Are they going to go through all the trouble of developing an alternative UI, like Touch Flo, but without the touch? Given 6.1's much needed improvements, it seems like it could be a waste of time if one were not trying to accomodate for a completely different method of ineraction, like finger gestures.

...but I'll withold final judgement until more is known.

On a side note, I installed the att 6.1 ROM on my Q9h. Wow what a difference! Push mail pings are actually holding out for 30 minutes, instead of the 3-6 minutes I used to get, so battery life with push mail is greatly enhanced, the home screen is MUCH better, GPS is nearly instant now as opposed to several minutes for a fix (if it didn't just time out), "to:" fields dynamically search your contacts now instead of having to open your contacts seperately, I love the way SMS works now, and ring tones are much louder.

[Damion Chaplin]

It's way too small. I think the palm of my hand would engulf the closed-form version of this. Call me crazy, but I like it when the phone extends more than halfway from my ear to my mouth.

With that square screen it looks like it's trying to contend with the Treo. I hope it's at least 360x360. I suppose it could be a landscape screen that's distorted by the picture-of-a-picture...