Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology.
When newly independent Motorola Mobility introduced its Atrix handset on AT&T at CES, the smartphone was generally well-received. But what drew more attention was the variability of accessories that the corporate has continued to support through other high-end launches equivalent to those of the Photon on Sprint and the Droid Bionic on Verizon.
These products now include a car dock for navigation, HDMI dock for entertainment, and lapdock for enhanced productivity. Motorola wasn’t the 1st company to introduce an HDMI dock, and Asus’ Padfone embeds a handset more directly into another device than do Motorola’s products. Taken together, though, the Motorola dock derby best positions the handset because the heart of a mobile lifestyle — one which may be easily transplanted in order that it may overcome the restrictions of its native form factor. This can be a fitting push for one of many few smartphone companies not vested in other traditional electronic devices consisting of PCs or televisions.
With the discharge of the Droid RAZR , Motorola hearkens back to the thinness and structural integrity of its once wildly popular featurephone. After all , the recent smartphone is generations previous to its namesake flip phone relating to software sophistication. But a brand new generation of Motorola accessories make the case that even smartphones have their limits. On the Droid RAZR launch, the corporate also announced MOTOACTV, a wearable screen that not just competes with a sudden slew of fitness activity monitors but in addition acts as a remote user interface for notifications and music control, corresponding to Sony Ericsson’s LiveView.
MOTOACTV is not the only trick that Motorola has on the end of its sleeve, though. The square-screened device also communicates via Bluetooth to 1 of 2 headphone sets that not just play music from the telephone, but include sensors to measure your heartbeat. (The headphones may also represent your heartbeat audibly without the MOTOACTV.) With the triad of a smartphone, Bluetooth headphones and the MOTOACTV , Motorola is marketing the primary genuine personal area network aimed toward consumers.
The corporate that began the year treating the smartphone as a molecular building block now appears to be breaking it into atoms strewn about your person. But both the bigger and smaller accessories (and the accessories’ accessories, such as a MOTOACTV wrist strap, armband and bike mount) both simply expand what defines the fashionable smartphone. With regards to a lapdock or HDMI dock, it is the display. With regards to heartbeat-monitoring headphones or an external screen just like the MOTOACTV, it is the size and sensors.
On the launch of the MOTOACTV, Motorola wouldn’t commit as to if it should open up the device to 3rd-party development, but there’s already a few companies — as a minimum a number of that are also using Android — intent on creating watch-sized devices with a variety of brands. That quest was an extended one, but what Motorola’s modularity demonstrates is that the smartphone software is becoming so entwined in our lives that they’re seeping out from the confines of a single device.
Ross Rubin ( @rossrubin ) is executive director and principal analyst of the NPD Connected Intelligence service at 0 The NPD Group 0 . Views expressed in Switched On are his own.
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