Motorola A3100 Feels Two Years Old

Another generic Windows Mobile device fails to generate much stir for Motorola at CES.

Motorola’s new A3100 all-touch-screen smartphone in a nutshell:

Guy next to me: “So what do you make of this thing?”
Me: “Eh, I’m not really a Windows Mobile guy.”
Guy next to me: “Who is?”

With Apple iPhone OS, Google Android, and now Palm WebOS competing in the smartphone space, it’s hard to believe that any company is still hacking up Windows Mobile phones, but Motorola is still trying to put a fresh face on the operating system equivalent of Britney Spears. (It’s overstayed its welcome a bit.)

The A3100 felt dated in every way in person. From the lack of an accelerometer for automatic switching from portrait to landscape mode (who presses a button for that anymore?) to its lame and unresponsive resistive touch screen, there wasn’t a lot to like.

The big news: Motorola has worked Windows Mobile 6.1 over with its own “carousel,” interface, but like most other attempts at dressing up the OS, this one can’t compensate for the massive shortcomings of Windows Mobile in every other arena. It simply adds a series of home screens that can be thumbed through with a swipe of the finger. Default categories like weather and RSS can’t be changed, and they barely improve anything to begin with. The virtual QWERTY keyboard is also Motorola’s own, and supposedly compensates for “fat-fingered typing” with predictive text, but felt far inferior to other options in the testing we did.

Ultimately, the A3100 felt like a huge anachronism, a phone that should have debuted at CES 2007 and still probably wouldn’t have made much of a splash if it did. The company’s promised Android phones can’t come soon enough.