Todays & Tomorrows Technology

Stop the presses! Motorola in “frankly quite reasonable phone, actually” shocker! Fresh to the Korean market comes this, the Motorola ROKR ZN50, a full-touchscreen slider with 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS and a T-DMB2 digital TV tuner. The 3.2-inch 240 x 427 touchscreen cellphone has a new Panorama UI, which looks surprisingly Android-like in its general layout and feel.

Even the three-panels design Motorola are touting – which gives three homescreens that can be flicked between and filled up with different icons and shortcuts – sounds like Android’s homescreen. Elsewhere there’s triband 900/1800/1900 GSM and 2100MHz WCDMA for up to 7.2Mbps HSDPA, together with Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 and a 3.5mm headphones jack.

Motorola have also thrown in the SRS WOW HD sound system and tweakable EQ settings, and a microSD slot good for up to 16GB cards. The ROKR ZN50 measures 108.9 x 54.0 x 14.34 mm, weighs 143g, and comes with a 950mAh battery. No word on whether it’ll see a release anywhere outside of Korea, however.

AT&T have announced the Motorola Karma QA1, an entry-level slider with full QWERTY keyboard and homescreen access to Facebook and MySpace. Aimed, unsurprisingly, at teenagers and young adults, the Karma has a 2.5-inch 240 x 320 display, 3.6Mbps HSDPA, a microSD card slot and 2-megapixel camera with video recording functionality.

There’s also A-GPS, and AT&T load their Navigator PND app onto the handset. The media player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, RealAudio, XMF and MIDI files, together with H.263 and MPEG4 video, and the Karma has both a 3.5mm headphone jack and A2DP stereo Bluetooth 2.0 support. You can also access AT&T CV video.

Video hands-on after the cut

The Karma has a full HTML browser, with a dedicated shortcut key, together with threaded messaging, mobile email support including Yahoo!, AOL and Windows Live Mail, and can send and receive SMS and MMS messages. There’s also a speakerphone, speech recognition, CrystalTalk active background noise filter and voice-memo recording.

AT&T will be selling the Motorola Karma QA1 from June 28th, priced at $79.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate. You’ll also need to budget for a minimum of a $39.99 voice plan and $20 data or messaging plan.

Motorola have unveiled a new Bluetooth headset, the Endeavor HX1, which the company claims to be the “only Bluetooth headset to use true bone conduction technology”. That’s likely going to raise some eyebrows over at Aliph, whose Jawbone headset is known for using a vibration-sensing system; in the HX1’s case, a new Stealth Mode shuts off the standard microphone and solely uses a bone conduction sensor in the earpiece.
That, Motorola say, is good enough to minimize the impact of even the most violent wind and ambient noise, and in fact can allow you to be heard even while standing in a concert. If you’re leaving the microphone switched on, then Motorola’s CrystalTalk system is also onboard for some more traditional noise-reduction.

Battery life is apparently good for seven hours talktime, and the HX1 can connect to multiple devices simultaneously making it handy for both cellphone and VoIP use. There are even voice-prompts, BlueAnt-style, to guide you in setting up Stealth Mode and pairing. The Motorola Endeavor HX1 will land in Asia come July; no word on pricing, nor when it might arrive in the US or Europe.