The Motorola WX445 has leaked a couple of times in the past, and we always assumed that it would be a lower-specced device, but now we know that it may be so low-end that it may not gain access to Google Mobile Services (Gmail, Market, etc). The folks at Android and Me received the alleged specs for the WX445, which they claim is called the Ciena, and they include a 3-inch QVGA display, 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7625 CPU, 256 MB of RAM, 512 MB of ROM, a 3 megapixel camera sans flash, and Android 2.1 with a kind-of-MOTOBLUR skin that will be missing all social networking features. Moto will also be including a Backtrack trackpad, like the ones found on the Backflip and Charm. The biggest news, though, is that Android and Me reports that the Ciena only has 100 MB of user storage, even though Google requires Android 2.1 devices to have at least 150 MB. This means that the Ciena may not have access to the usual Google services, although I'm sure that Motorola wouldn't release a handset without Gmail, the Android Market, and all of the other usual services, so perhaps Moto is going to convince Google to bend the rules for them. Verizon is currently evaluating the Ciena, so if they give it the go-ahead, we could be seeing it as soon as this month.
If this crazy-low spec list for the Ciena is true, I would be surprised to see Motorola and Verizon charge more than $50 for the device with a two-year contract. Making it free would probably be the smartest move, but I have a hard time believing that Big Red would offer one of their smartphones for free right out of the gate. Whatever price point the Ciena gets when/if it's released, it's going to have a lot of competition from cheap BlackBerrys and other Android devices as they all try to gain attention from first-time smartphone buyers, and I'm not sure that the price point alone would be enough to sell the device to a lot of consumers. We don't even know if Verizon is actually going to launch the device or not, though, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens. Do you think the low-specced Ciena would be successful with consumers or will it get lost in the sea of upcoming Verizon devices?
Via Android and Me
