Motorola Alexander

Year: 2008
Prototype level: Cancelled
Codename: Alexander

Overview

The Motorola Alexander was an unreleased smartphone developed in 2008 as one of Motorola’s ambitious attempts to regain ground in the high-end smartphone market. The slider design incorporated a physical QWERTY keyboard and was planned with features including an NVIDIA graphics processor, GPS and a high-resolution camera. Early reports suggested that Alexander might use Symbian UIQ, but photographs of later prototypes showed the device running Windows Mobile 6.1 instead. 

Alexander reached the prototype stage and was expected to launch towards the end of 2008, but Motorola ultimately cancelled the project before it reached the market. The cancellation came as Motorola was reassessing its smartphone strategy and moving away from UIQ and towards Windows Mobile and eventually Android. Alexander is therefore an interesting example of Motorola’s late-2000s struggle to establish a competitive smartphone platform beyond the RAZR era.