Motorolla i335 and ic602 Revealed!

Motorola i335 is a thin candybar with a rubber keypad that feels like leather and a funky corrugated plastic back.

Motorola's iDen phones for Nextel are the sadly ignored wallflowers of any Motorola event, but they're pretty flowers nonetheless. So I wasn't surprised to find at tonight's Motorola get-together two unheralded, untrumpeted new Nextels: the purely iDen i335 (at left) and the combo iDen/EVDO i602.

Regardless, Motorola and its partner in iDEN crime Sprint (as in Nextel) have yet to say anything more than that it'll be out for holidays and it will be "affordable." Yeah, it's missing a camera, a big LCD and any kind of bandwidth. But it's better looking than the other Nextel phones, and its price, still unannounced, is supposedly rock bottom.


Motorolla i335 is an entry-level, candy-bar-style walkie-talkie phone that's all about tactile feel: a rubbery keypad, a textured back, and silvery, rubbery sides. It's a lot of fun to hold in your hand, and it has all the usual Nextel functions, including Java and their off-network Direct Talk walkie-talkie system. It's coming by the end of the year.

Motorolla i602 is a midrange combo Sprint/Nextel phone that, according to the Motorolan who showed it to me at the event, has EVDO and a 2-megapixel camera but no memory card slot or music player. But according to the product book Motorola handed out after the event, it only has a VGA camera and 1X data. Hmm ... Its screen, while somewhat high-res, is smaller and lower-res than the ic902, the ultra-high-end in the Sprint Nextel line. That one is coming early this fall. Expect both new phones to be quite rugged and to provide the usual blaring Nextel volume.
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