Motorola Devour? Who came up with that horrendous name? Is that phone going to eat your fingers and bank account?

Is it really any worse than Crazer (KRZR)?

Motorola is one of the most self-destructive companies I've seen in years. Despite Android providing a reprieve of their mobile business doom, it seems they've decided to make it only a temporary stay. I wouldn't count them completely out of the game, but they're showing signs that they intend to firmly keep ploughing the course of irrelevance.

Yeah. I guess so. At least its not got one of their stupid 4 letter names. I guess those names were intended to appeal to the SMS generation.

Their "music" phones are evidence of this. They've either got an awful MP3 player or an awful iTunes interface. I'm surprised they even still offer the iTunes interface since its so restricted.

For better or worse, Motorola's plan seems to be trying to outbuild the clone vendors in terms of making top-drawer Android phones. They've apparently got some large number of Android devs now working for them, which means that they can, at least in theory, stay somewhat ahead of the game.

If they're the first to market with any given random feature by 3-6 months, that's actually worth something. It will be interesting to see whether the Android open-source codebase hangs together or whether it fractures in some fashion as different vendors compete to differentiate their Android devices.

Like maybe voice dialing from a bluetooth headset?

The Droid was $110 at Amazon today. I nearly went for it.

I tend to think that their problem when it comes to Android is a lack of focus. From what I've heard they're planning on releasing at least a dozen phones, probably many more than that. They should be focusing on creating 2 or 3 really excellent phones.

I can only name a single mobile company that places a strong focus on quality over quantity. And one other that places slightly less focus, but still much more than anyone else in the picture. I would have thought Motorola would have learned from their own past performance and that of their competitors, but I guess not. It looks like they're intent on making Android into the next Windows Mobile. It's something I actually think Google should take more of a stance against with their partner/developer agreements.

Like Microsoft Voice Command?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Voice_Command
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/downloads/microsoft/about-voice-command.mspx

I think this was actually an MP3 Player but the infamous iBeat Blaxx has to be on that list somewhere.

One more strategy that may make sense for Google: Google "wins" when the web browsing platform is a commodity where users can run anything they want without some company trying to act as an intermediary. That brings more eyeballs to Google.com and that means ad revenue. Google looses when a firm like RIM makes a command decision to redirect web searches to Bing. Google wins when those sorts of controls are in the hands of its users.

By giving Android away, and keeping a fairly light hand on the tiller, Google provides a value proposition that the embedded market can't resist, and that the carriers grudgingly go along with because their own software development can't compete.

You know, every time I hear about a phone lacking voice control (like the iPhone did (does?)), whether over bluetooth or not, I think about Microsoft's product. I used that about three years ago on my Treo 700W, and was astonished at how well it worked! What surprised me even more was that it worked with zero training, and with names in my contact list!

That said, it wasn't to the extent that Google is doing it, where if you speak clearly enough you can actually compose with it.

Did. Apple added full offline speech recognition with the 3GS. No need to prerecord names, and it also works for music control. It's not quite to the level of what Microsoft was doing, but at least it allows dialing without taking the phone out of your pocket.

I need to find a way to get it hooked up to my car via bluetooth at some point, since Centrafuse still hasn't added bluetooth media controls to their software.