After a day looking at some of Motorola's current and future products, I came back with mixed feelings: both disappointed of not seeing the next generation Razr and impressed on the scope of projects the company engineers are working on.

For example, one of the largest demo area of the research day was focused on a set of technologies called MotoWi4 (Wimax, fixed, indoor and mesh) showing Motorola's "savoir-faire" in end to end wireless infrastructure solutions: from user devices to smart antennas and base stations.

That's actually when I realised how much the company is betting so much its future on Wimax' success, while still developing cellular technologies for the post 3G and 4G era, namely LTE, or Long Term Evolution. According to Motorola engineers, LTE will be the successor to today's 3G networks, probably in the next 5 years, and will share some of the same basic technologies than Wimax. However, LTE chips will supposedly consume less power than its Wimax counterparts at full uplink speed. Unless of course, Intel gets really aggressive in designing and applying Moore's law to its upcoming Wimax chipsets.

IP TV and video delivery, either through set top boxes or cell phones, was another important topic at Motorola Labs' open house. I saw for example the Social TV demo which was about adding social networking to the TV experience, where you could see what channel your buddies were watching, switch to the same channel and chat with them using the voice over IP capability integrated to the set top.

No "One Hit Wonder" in the Labs
Of course, coming all the way to Motorola's HQ, I was hoping to see the next generation Razr, the killer mobile device that would push aside the Apple iPhone. Well, not to say that I was a bit disappointed. Sure, there was some interesting phone applications. Like the bluetooth device that you would plug on your car's computer system and that enables you to lock/unlock your car with your phone, or that will forward inbound calls to your voicemail if you are too busy in a driving maneuver. There was also the Motion Presence demo where you receive text messages on the location information of your closest family members. A system that works only on GSM networks, because CDMA base stations do not share location information. Another cool product is Femto: a home gateway that will intercept your cell communications to pass it through the Internet. Of course, there was the inevitable YouTube videos demo on a cell phone that showed the encoding capability of a server, from the Flash video (H263) to the cell phone 3GPP (MPEG-4) format, on the fly.

But inspite of this influx of new technologies, not even a glimpse of the potential successor for the Razr. "We want to go beyond the one hit wonder", said Motorola President, Greg Brown, referring to rock star mobile devices like the Razr family or the TAC phones before that. The problem is that Motorola needs that next "one hit wonder" to bring profitability back to its mobile devices unit and even perhaps save CEO Ed Zander. By the way, Motorola employees I talked to were quite pessimisitic on Zander's chance to stay at the company! In his closing speech, Brown talked about how successful the Motorola Ming (pictured) was in China and elsewhere. To be honest, this is the first time I heard of it! I guess will have to wait for the the first Wimax devices, probably smartphones a-la Motorola Q. But that won't come before mid to end of next year at the latest. The same time when Moto execs expect the mobile devices unit to become profitable. But that's an eternity in the technology world!

And here's a video of Motorola's CEO keynote at Wimax World conference on the company's push of Wimax: