There’s an image floating around the internets of an as yet to be released Motorola device that’s turning quite a few heads. Here’s what we know: This mysterious smartphone packs a 5 row QWERTY keyboard, it looks like it runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it doesn’t have any front facing buttons, and from the shape it kind of looks like a Droid RAZR. The guys at Android Central say it has a quarter HD resolution display and that it’s going to land on Sprint, but they don’t have a clue as to when that’ll actually happen or how much this thing is going to cost. Could this be a variant of the Droid RAZR HD we’re all expecting to see? That makes sense seeing as how we recently saw a leak of the Motorola Dinara for AT&T. Verizon will call their Dinara the RAZR HD, AT&T will call their Dinara the Atrix 3, and Sprint will … they usually have horrible names that don’t make any sense, so we’re not going to bother predicting this one.
This brings up an important point. Later this month Samsung is going to launch the Galaxy S III in the United States. Every operator that’s selling it will call it the Galaxy S III, every operator that’s selling it will release a model that looks exactly like the European Galaxy S III, so as far as consumers know, there’s only one device. Meanwhile, Motorola is creating multiple operator variants, which complicates their supply chain, all to appease some petty tyrants who want some form of differentiation. Annoying, isn’t it?
We look forward to seeing what Motorola will launch this summer, but let’s be honest for a second. What we really want to see is Google completely overhaul the company and create some devices that, like the Microsoft Surface, push things to the next level.