Motorola Aura Video

Motorola Aura Video Transcript

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>> Hi. I'm Kent German, Senior Editor for cell phones at CNET.com. I'm here at CES 2009 of course. I wanna show you the Motorola Aura. This is a really interesting phone. Motorola introduced it earlier this year. What it is, is actually is a very design-centric phone as you might see. It was inspired by high-end watches, so a few things unique about this phone, it is one of the only -- it is the only phone with completely circular display. What we have seen before is we've seen phones that maybe the frame surrounding the screen is circular and then the actual display itself is square. But it is very interesting in that sense, you can see a nice -- have a clock design here. It would actually does it like a regular clock or regular watch. This is etched here on the front. It takes about two weeks to do apparently. It's very nicely designed. It is stainless steel, has the Swiss workings involved. There is ball bearings for this flip, it goes like that. You might think this phone looks like the V70, which is a Motorola that they had quite a few years ago, same sort of thing where you have the kind of a big round section up here and then a smaller section that flipped up. Of course this, it has -- it does have a circle display that Motorola V70 did not. One thing that's interesting with this you can see here on the back there are -- the get -- you can see the gear is inside, so you can see the phone as it turns. I can say that it feels very solid, very sturdy. I can imagine this phone wearing out over time. As -- a lot of phones that have the swivel design, we've seen those before, swivels tend to break -- fall out or tend to wear out over time that I discover. I had a Sony Ericsson and there was a swivel and it just broke up pretty quickly. So, this is nice, it definitely feel solid in the hand. It is a bit heavy, certainly not a phone that you would -- I mean, you could slip it in a pocket, but certainly not a phone that you wanna slip in a small purse around the pocket because it does feel a little weighty, but of course with that heavy -- that with have heaviness you do get very solid phone, very sturdy, so I do like it in that sense. It does have a camera. It is 2-megapixel. It has a music player. You slipped up the phone like that you can see that they have the circ -- a nice menu design. I can't make calls on this because there's not an active SIM in it. But if you go to the menu, we can see that there are -- the icons around. Reminds me a little bit of the menu design that Motorola started on a Motorola Rokr E8 and a couple of other phones where they had a little icons, so you could just rotate through. Have a -- navigation toggle here in the middle. It's pretty nice. It is raised above the surface of the phone. It is little big and a nice sectional keys. Keys are flat, but did -- they were a little slippery, but I did feel like I could use them pretty easily. There's just a volume rocker. There is a meg -- there is memory card, it is behind the battery or this maybe in the battery cover, which I'm not the biggest fan of, but it does nice to have the memory. Has all the features you might expect, sort of a mid-range features set. It has that megapixel camera, has a music player, organizer features and has a messaging and any -- things like that. So, pretty interesting phone, pretty flashy, pretty fashionable -- will cost you. It is 1999.99 -- that's $1,999. It is available at Motorola.com. A carrier does not offer this and I can't imagine a carrier in the U.S. at least offering it. I think even the -- did that rebate would probably not be enough to really cover the cost of the phone, but if you like flash, if you like some blitz, if you like some bling, definitely a phone that I would consider. This is the Motorola Aura, really -- has a [inaudible], but all about the design. ^M00:03:02 [ Music ]