iLounge

Backstage: Motorola’s V3x, a smarter iTunes phone design?

By Jeremy Horwitz

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Sunday, July 17, 2005
Category: Backstage

If we were betting, notes Larry, we would put a lot of money on this - the new Motorola RAZR V3x - to be one of the iPod/iTunes phones. Why? Other than one fact, it just makes sense.

Start with the core iPod-ready feature set: the great RAZR phone body most people dig, combined with what looks to be white glossy plastic and the latest in Motorola technology. There’s support for TransFlash/MicroSD memory cards (512MB - just enough for 100 iPod songs), wireless stereo Bluetooth sound (which in a perfect world would mean compatibility with Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, conveniently supported in new Macs), and playback of AAC+ and MP3 audio files.

Then there’s the other, non-iPod stuff people would want from a next-generation phone - a 2 megapixel camera, 3D gaming, realtime two-way video conferencing, MPEG4/movie/media support, and simple web browsing. It just all seems “right,” especially considering the oddball appearance of a RAZR-esque icon in iTunes 4.9 mentioned on the site some time ago.

The one fact that wouldn’t make sense, of course, is that there’s a photo and announcement of the phone on Motorola’s site already, and no announcement from Apple. If this was an iTunes phone, particularly a premium one, we’d have expected the cat to remain in the bag until… well, a week or day before the “expected to be available in Q4 2005” date. Larry’s guess: contrary to all the rumors out there, Apple is going to hold off on doing an iTunes phone until after the fifth-generation iPod launch, and then do this, because it’s “right.” Then all Motorola phones released thereafter will be iTunes-ready. Quite a guess, but here’s hoping. It would be a hell of a lot better than launching that atrocious Xbox phone. We’ll obviously have to just wait and see.