Motorola Tries to Recapture Past Glory With AURA: Falls Short

motorola-aura-3-257x300Motorola is not the company it was in the heyday of its glory handsets. The StarTAC and RAZR set the standards for small thin phones and the company was happy to ride the wave created by those two phones for far too long. Their phone lineup has suffered in recent years, and they’ve seemingly fallen off the map in the mobile phone arena of late. They pinned big hopes on the sexy AURA but preliminary reviews show it falling short in key areas.

The AURA is sleek and stylish, and it sports a clever rotating front that spins up to reveal the number keys. The big red face looks very modern and on first blush it appears that Motorola has produced a winner: if you can get past the price, anyway. How much is the price of the Motorola AURA? You ready for this? Try GBP 1,300 ($1,936). Yes, that is a one followed by a three hundred making the AURA one of the most expensive phones in the world. Something tells me that Motorola needs to do better than this to reclaim their glory position in the market.

Gadget Monkeys takes a long hard look at the AURA and just can’t seem to get past the many shortcomings of this mega-priced phone. They point out that the seemingly clever round face doesn’t fit any real functions most people use the phone to do as they are designed for squarish screens.

The Aura is a quad-band phone with no 3G, no Wi-Fi and no GPS. It has 2GB of memory but no flash card slot for adding more. It plays music but the headset connector uses microUSB which makes it difficult to substitute your own headphones for those Motorola provides.

The camera shoots at just 2 megapixels, lacks flash or autofocus and suffers hugely from that framing problem I mentioned earlier. Oh and it shoots video, but only at 176 x 144.

It looks like Motorola missed the mark, and by a wide margin. Too bad, because it’s a sexy phone.

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