Motorola MPx / MPx300

Cancelled
26th February 2004

Note: the Motorola MPx has now been cancelled after a limited release in Asia.

The Motorola MPx shows that Motorola is a first rate company when designing innovative clamshells, however it's marketing department seems to be pretty clueless.

Originally billed at the MPx300, to form the top end of a range of phones starting with the MPx100, then MPx200/220, it's clear that some bright spark at Motorola decided that it would nicely confuse everyone if they took off the number altogether. Presumably the same bright spark who named the top-of-the range clamshell the V80 instead of the more logical V800.

Why is the name important? Well, frankly the MPx is an important and innovative phone in a number of ways. Firstly, it's a Windows Smartphone 2003 device with a large 320x240 pixel display, a 1.3 megapixel camera, built-in QWERTY keyboard and stylus input and a unique hinge that allows you use it either as a phone or a PDA. We'd love to show you this, but somehow Motorola's press department have neglected to provide us with any stills of this interesting feature and the best we can find are some rather small videos here. We'll try to get you some better pictures because despite Motorola's best efforts to kill the phone at birth, the Motorola MPx, MPx300 or whatever the heck it's called is certainly one of the most interesting phones we've seen in a while, and competes somewhat with the Nokia 9500 Communicator.

Like the Nokia 9500, the MPx sports built-in wireless ethernet, but doesn't have EDGE support relying on the slower GPRS system instead. It also features Bluetooth and infra-red connectivity, and like all Windows PCs it comes with some Microsoft Office compatible applications.

The screen is a lot smaller that the Nokia's, measuring 320x240 pixels compared with 640x200, so it's not so good for web browsing but is still pretty useful.

The QWERTY keyboard looks to be useful, but silly old Motorola have forgotten to show us a decent photo. Stylus input seems to be overkill though. As for the hinge, well, we'd like to have a much closer look at how robust that is.

Be in no doubt that the Motorola MPx is a hugely significant phone and with its WiFi capabilities, clever format and decent camera it's also hugely impressive from a technical perspective. However, Motorola are going to have to try much harder to get the word out than they are at present, if they want the MPx to succeed.

Update: 1st July

In the past couple of months, the Motorola marketing department have released more details and some more photos - the most important one below of the MPx opened to reveal it's keyboard. Looks like a sawn-off Nokia Communication a little.

A close look reveals the dual-mode keyboard, QWERTY in one direction, numeric in the other. Kind of odd, but clever.