Gossip

What's Motorola's big phone secret?

Enormous secrecy, encrypted packets, digital signature needed. What's it all about? Apparently, Wednesday, Motorola is going to announce a huge, very important, and totally secret phone. There's just one problem ...

... everybody knows about it already!

Sniffer wasn't the only person to intercept the clear packets from IDG's Infoworld web site last Friday. They said, pretty unambiguously:

"In a move that may help establish Microsoft's long-sought-after credibility in the mobile phone market, mobile operator Orange SA, handset maker Motorola Inc and Microsoft Corp intend to announce that Orange will sell a Microsoft-based Motorola phone," attributing this to "sources familiar with the plans."

That report appeared last week.

Monday this week, the PR agency concerned with Motorola sent out an "urgent NDA document" urging journalists to sign it because an announcement would be made Wednesday, but was under embargo till the 15th.

Is it the same announcement?

Microsoft, a party to "an announcement" (it won't say what about) on Wednesday - embargoed to 15th September - and Orange (which has been warning journalists to expect an announcement) have been promising "a big top-tier phone maker going with Windows Mobile 2003" for some months.

Motorola has already announced its Linux phone and its Symbian phone, and has said that it is "platform agnostic" about which operating system it will use long term. So it's not exactly Sherlock Holmes's hardest case, really ...

Put it this way, kids: if you give me an announcement Wednesday which is substantially the same as the Inforworld article, your NDA is worth every penny of what I'd pay for it ...