“Motorola unveiled a slim smartphone with a qwerty keyboard and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 at its analyst conference on Monday night, but details of the company’s mobile music deal with Apple Computer have yet to emerge,” Stephen Lawson reports for IDG News Service. “At last year’s conference Motorola announced that consumers would be able to download music to its phones via a mobile version of iTunes in the first half of 2005, but that offering has yet to hit the market. Motorola CEO Ed Zander tried to reassure analysts that this is still in the pipeline.”
“We’re not going to launch the iTunes phone today,” Zander said. “Steve Jobs is not going to jump out of a cake, and we’re not going to launch it tomorrow… but it’s real and it’s happening. Stay tuned for iTunes.”
Full article here.
The Windows phone is called “Q,” and Motorola calls it “the thinnest, lightest QWERTY phone on the planet is here: introducing Moto Q. A seamless fusion of QWERTY and mobile phone technology, the Q delivers email, voice, and entertainment in one amazingly rich but thin device. This fully loaded phone features Motorola’s renowned RAZR-thin design, along with flexible email thanks to Microsoft’s latest Windows Mobile 5.0 software. Smart, hardworking and powerful, the Moto Q will help mobile professionals improve productivity through the power of seamless mobility.” More info here.
Motorola CEO Zander yesterday reiterated the promise to deliver a phone that runs Apple’s iTunes software by the end of September and declined to comment about how carriers feel about the phone.
MacDailyNews Take: If Steve Jobs ever jumps out of a cake, this is probably the cake he’d choose. This Motorola iTunes phone thing — of which we’re well past the just-release-the-damn-thing phase — is either going to be a colossal success or a doomed failure. Or something in between 
We’ll never know, because it’s the never-ending Motorola iTunes phone story! This thing has had more false starts than Stuttering John Melendez. Geez, we get all excited (again), and what do we get? A Windows phone announcement. Ooh, thank you very much, but, uh… yuck. It’s like driving forever to a five-star restaurant only to be handed a McDonald’s menu. Could it be more anticlimactic?
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