Cingular and Motorola Offer Gold RAZR

While the new gold color sure is purty and would tempt Bond villain Auric Goldfinger himself (and probably Lindsay Lohan), Motorola and its carrier partners should be working on new, innovative handsets and stop with the endless parade of facelifts to a has-been device.At this point, the MOTORAZR has been offered in every color of the rainbow. Originally silver, then black, then pink, blue and some other weird pastels, and most recently red and now gold. Enough already. Time to move on and design something new!

Granted, the elite members of society need their mobile phones to be as shiny and unique as possible (think Paris Hilton's diamond-encrusted T-Mobile Sidekick), but a gold RAZR is no longer going to do the trick. Why? Because it's an old, old, old phone. The original RAZR was released in late 2004. True, it has had some nice evolutionary updates, but nothing too radical. You'll be hard pressed to find another handset on the market today that was originally released over 2 years ago. And there's a reason for that.

Technology changes and constantly improves. Mobile operators want the newest, latest and greatest devices available on their networks to excite new customers. While the RAZR has demonstrated amazing staying power, it is no longer the market animal it was. Motorola even released the supposed successor to the RAZR, its KRZR (pronounced krazer) handsets last summer. The phones, however, failed to really take off like the RAZR.

Motorola dazzled us with the original RAZR and some successive releases like the Q, so we know it can design knock-out phones. My question is, when will it stop milking past successes and create the next revolution in handset design?