Moto links the smartphone to the PBX

Motorola’s newest smartphone won’t be the fancy 3G device we’re used to seeing in operator commercials or window displays. In fact, this is a smartphone you can’t even buy from the operators. Moto is launching a new line of enterprise wireless PBX phones that incorporate the e-mail, SMS and Web browsing capabilities of any other Windows Mobile device, but they won’t have any wide area wireless connectivity.

Motorola is developing a line of enterprise wireless terminals that run on the Windows Mobile OS and support many of the basic office and productivity applications that would go on a normal smartphone, but those applications would work only within the enterprise wireless network. In addition, Motorola is developing SMS-over-WLAN and push-to-talk over WLAN protocols for the devices.

Most of the wireless LAN PBX products on the market today are voice-centric, merely tying a phone extension to a wireless handset, said Russ Knister, senior director of product marketing for Moto’s converged enterprise communications group. But Motorola is hearing from its customers that they want much more than voice; they want many of the basic data networking functions they can get at their desktop.

“A lot of what we’re seeing around wireless LAN are really just cordless phones,” Knister said. “We have to move beyond that market and make these devices more like smartphones.”

So why not just sell regular 3G smartphones with Wi-Fi connectivity? Knister said Moto is tapping into an entirely different market. The smartphone is geared at the corporate executive or salesman that works around the clock or the always-connected tech-savvy set. Moto’s enterprise smartphone is geared at the hourly workers that doesn’t bring work home with them such as retail workers or office supervisors that need access to instant communications on the job.