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MOTOMAGX and the RAZR2

August 8, 2007 | 2 Comments

A few months ago I wrote about Motorola’s embrace of open platforms. Several people pointed out that Motorola had never committed to releasing SDKs for writing native Linux apps, suggesting that the company’s investment in Linux was only for the benefit of Motorola and its carrier customers.

They had been hinting at it for a long time, but yesterday at Linuxworld Motorola confirmed that they will be opening up to third-party developers. Cynics may focus on the term ’select developers’, but I think this is consistent with a phased release of a major development platform.

Motorola also announced a set of web development tools based around WebKit, which represents another step towards open standards, although in this case they’re playing catch-up to Nokia and Apple. Motorola continue their campaign against vowels: collectively, their Java, Web, and Linux development platforms are now called MOTOMAGX.

Finally, they confirmed that the Razr2 will be the first Linux-based phone from Motorola to ship in North America. (You can buy an unlocked Ming at CompUSA or Amazon.com, but no carrier sells it.)

It’s not on sale yet, but we got our hands on our first Razr2 on Monday night. We don’t normally do this, but we thought we owed it to the gadget fiends out there to post the unboxing …

Obsessive-compulsives take note: the T-Mobile logo does not imply that they will be carrying the phone, only that we put a T-Mobile SIM into it.

Posted by: Jason
Categories: Technology, Phones