Verizon's First Touchscreen Moto - Motorola Blaze
Verizon Wireless, lacking a focused strategy to battle Apple's current iPhone and upcoming iPhone 3G, has been flooding their CDMA market with touchscreen handsets of all sorts for the better half of the past year. With a dizzying array of almost-there touchscreen handsets aimed at Verizon customers looking for a good iPhone-compromise on America's "most reliable network," Verizon has just shed some light on yet another touchscreen offering.
Enlarge pictureIt seems that Motorola is going into the touchscreen direction with more and more of its handset. After the two Mings (A1600 and A1800) and the A810 – all three released in China – we have another Moto-made touchscreen phone, named Motorola Blaze.
The Blaze was recently spotted at Boy Genius Report, coming in a clamshell form factor not too different from the one the above-mentioned Ming handsets come in. But while the A1600 and A1800 are China-bound, the Blaze will be available in the US, via Verizon Wireless. There's no official info yet to sustain this, but since the new Moto comes with Verizon's logo and a Verizon user interface (we can see these in the available images), it's obvious that, sometime in the near future, the second largest US carrier will include the Blaze in its product line-up.
It shares a few design cues as other Motorola handsets. BGR refers it to be a "MING crossed with a PEBL crossed with a RAZR 2." It comes with a custom operating system for Verizon and won't be high end or anything like that, functioning just fine as the average cell phone without taking on too many responsibilities.
Features include :-
- Haptick feedback
- 2 megapixel camera
- EV-DO Rev. A support
- GPS navigation
- Bluetooth connectivity
- MobileTV
A custom Verizon OS powers the Motorola Blaze, making sure that the company's woefully clunky software kills off any chance that the Blaze could actually be a hit. But, if things like a seriously squishy touchscreen and barely acceptable user interface aren't deal-killers, Verizon customers might be impressed by the 2 megapixel camera, EVDO Rev. A, GPS, Bluetooth, and mobile TV features that lie beneath the full-body touchscreen.
As a potential iPhone 3G alternative, the Motorola Blaze looks to fall short of delivering the shelf-appeal required to battle Cupertino's handset offering. But, don't count the Motorola Blaze out just yet, July 11 is still a couple weeks off.
