Motorola introduces A3100, VA76r and W233 Renew

With only two days left to the start of CES 2009 Motorola gave fans a reason to be looking forward to it. The American company announced three new handsets that are going to make their first public appearance at the event.

The WinMo-powered fully touch-enabled Motorola A3100, previously leaked as Attila, is definitely the most interesting of the bunch. The other two offerings are the AT&T-exclusive rugged-looking VA76r and the W233 Renew that has a body made entirely of recycled plastic water bottles.

Motorola A3100, nicknamed MOTOSURF, runs on the Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro and supports quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and tri-band UMTS (with HSDPA). It sports a 2.8" QVGA display and a 3 megapixel autofocus camera.

Motorola A3100

The A3100 MOTOSURF utilizes the all too familiar MSM7201A Qualcomm chipset and has 128 MB of RAM. There is also a microSD card slot for expanding the built-in flash memory of 512MB with up to 16 GB. The other highlights of Motorola A3100 include Wi-Fi, GPS, USB v2.0 and Bluetooth.

Motorola A3100 is expected to be available in selected markets by the end of Q1 2009.

The clamshell Motorola VA76r or otherwise known as Motorola Tundra (wasn't that a Toyota in the first place), offers midrange functionality and is going to be exclusive to AT&T. It's a ruggedized device that has been certified to MIL-STD 810F US military standard for resistance to rain, shock, vibration, dust, humidity, salt fog and extreme temperatures much like most Panasonic Toughbooks, Sonim XP1 and XP3, and Verizon's Casio G'zOne Type-V mobile phone.

Motorola VA76r

The Tundra VA76r comes with a 2.2" 262K color QVGA main display and an 1.05" external one with a resolution of 96x80 pixels. Having quad-band GSM support makes it capable of worldwide roaming but the dual band UMTS with HSDPA support has limited usage outside the US.

The other more important features of Motorola VA76r include a 2 megapixel fixed-focus snapper, USB and Bluetooth connectivity, 100 MB of internal memory and a microSD card slot. It also comes with AT&T Navigator and supports all of its location-based services.

The Motorola VA76r will become available via AT&T starting from January 13th at 200 US dollars after a $50 mail-in-rebate.

The last announced phone is the Motorola W233 Renew. It is the first environmentally friendly handset by Motorola, having a body made of recycled plastic bottles.

Motorola W233 Renew

Other than that the phone has very limited functionality including dual-band GSM support, miniUSB connectivity and a 65K color CSTN display with a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. There is also support for memory cards up to 2GB.

Motorola W233 Renew will be available for environmental-conscious users to grab starting from the beginning of Q1 2009 presumably through T-Mobile USA.