by Sascha Segan

LAS VEGAS–Motorola on Tuesday announced three new phones, including the company's first phone made of recycled plastic, a ruggedized phone for AT&T, and a Web-optimized slab phone primarily for Asian markets.

Moto's most innovative new phone is the W233 Renew. Destined for T-Mobile, the Renew is a simple, bar-style voice phone with green accents. All the plastic used to make the Renew is recycled from the sort of large water bottles used in office water coolers, said Melissa Gardner, Motorola's vice president of global franchise marketing.

"We've had a lot of input from consumers who are interested in more eco-responsible mobile products," Gardner said.

The W233 doesn't use PVC, a chemical targeted for elimination by environmental groups. Motorola will eliminate PVC and another toxic chemical group, brominated flame retardants, from all of their products by 2010, Gardner said. The Renew also has recyclable packaging and comes with a postage-paid recycling envelope for a user's previous phone.

Motorola is also contributing to carbonfund.org, a "carbon offsetting" organization, for every Renew sold. Carbon (dioxide) offset groups plant trees and do other pro-environmental work on the principle that such work will help mitigate environmental damage caused by manufacturing or transportation. Confusingly, Motorola says this makes the phone "carbon free," which is wrong in two ways: the company means carbon dioxide, not elemental carbon, and manufacturing still releases carbon dioxide. Motorola is just planting trees to try to make up for it.

Spec-wise, the W233 is a basic dual-band U.S. GSM phone with a small, 1.6-inch 128x128 color screen, 9 hours of talk time, and support for a 2-Gbyte MicroSD memory card. The phone includes a music player and uses Motorola's CrystalTalk noise reduction scheme for phone calls. The W233 measures 1.8 inches x 4.4 inches x 0.6 inches, and weighs three ounces. T-Mobile will put it on sale by the end of February.

Motorola's second new phone for the U.S., the Tundra VA76r, is a ruggedized flip phone with push-to-talk capability that takes some of its heritage from Motorola's line of iDen products for Nextel, Gardner said.

The Tundra is the first 3G phone we've seen running Motorola's Linux-based MOTOMAGX platform, which Motorola chief executive Sanjay Jha has targeted for elimination. The Tundra is also the first phone with CrystalTalk Plus, which takes Motorola's noise-cancellation software to a new level. CrystalTalk Plus uses dual microphones to knock out noise being transmitted to the other end of a call; Gardner said it even works "if you have five stereo speakers around your head, all blaring rock music."

The Tundra looks a lot like AT&T's existing, ruggedized Samsung Rugby. The phone has a 2-megapixel camera on the outside of the flip, 100 Mbytes of internal memory, a microSD memory card slot that supports cards up to 4 GB, GPS, and stereo Bluetooth support. The phone is ruggedized to military spec, which means it's resistant to heat, cold, and splashing liquids, but can't be submerged in water for long periods of time.

The Tundra will be available for $199.99 with a two-year contract and a $50 rebate from AT&T on January 13.

Finally, the Motosurf A3100 is a slab-style Windows Mobile handset that may never see the light of day in the U.S.; it's destined for Asia first, Gardner said. Oddly, it'll work just fine on AT&T, as it's a quad-band EDGE and tri-band HSDPA phone that supports both AT&T's 850/1900 network and the foreign 2,100-MHz 3G bands.

Motorola calls the A3100 a "touch tablet," but it's just a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional phone, with a 2.8-inch 320x240 resistive touch screen, a 400-MHz Qualcomm processor, dual cameras (3 megapixels on the back, VGA on the front), GPS, a microSD card slot and stereo Bluetooth. To connect to the Internet, the A3100 has HSDPA 7.2, HSUPA and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g.

Like HTC with its TouchFLO and Samsung with its TouchWIZ, Motorola has finally gone ahead and customized Windows Mobile with the company's own home screen designed to make the operating system more touch-friendly. Moto's custom home screen has a carousel-style icon menu along the bottom of the screen that can be swiped to pick a favorite task. There are custom Facebook, YouTube and Shozu apps that are all touch friendly, and Motorola used a touch-friendly version of the Opera Web browser on the phone, Gardner said.

None of these releases are the kind of flagship products Motorola would need to arrest its decline over the past two years. Under the company's new chief executive, Sanjay Jha, the formerly global number-two phone maker has slashed its staff and said it will reduce the number of software platforms the company works with. Motorola representatives wouldn't comment on their larger organizational issues, saying that the company is in a quiet period involving regulatory filings. But they did commit to releasing a steady stream of new phones throughout the year, though.

source : http://www.pcmag.com/