In example one, we have that video Matt showed you from earlier this week of Steve Jobs pitching products he positively adores. In the other we have, well, that abomination known as the Motorola ROKR.

The difference is pretty striking, interesting, amazing, unbelievable, really nice. [Matt Buchanan's Tweet, CNET]

The EQ3 runs off four AAA batteries, which are included in the packaging. The two speakers fold out, pseudo-locking at the 90 degree angle to the unit’s body before folding out to essentially double the speaker’s length and halve its depth.

As you’d expect from such a small pair of speakers, there’s a lack of bass and bit of tinniness to your music, but it far exceeds the quality of many phones and laptops inbuilt speakers. It’s as simple a unit as you’re likely to find – the only semblance of controls on the stapler is a power switch on top. Volume is controlled through your device, and it does get quite loud, although it does distort the sound at loud volumes.

In the end, this is a bit of a low-tech peripheral, but that’s what it’s meant to be. It’s small enough (130 x 35 x 35 mm) and lightweight enough (140g) to be a good accessory for travellers, or someone looking for a cheap set of backup speakers.

Insiders always start by attacking Motorola’s corporate culture, formed decades ago when radio was the company’s bread-and-butter. Motorola made its bones building end-to-end systems–not just hardware, but the infrastructure that supports it. That, in turn, has led to a culture in which engineers reign supreme, and are allowed to sneer at their more right-brain-inclined colleagues. Marketers? Designers who focus on usability as opposed to circuitry? At Motorola, they’re peons.

“There’s this amazing wealth of engineering talent, but there’s no system for harnessing that talent for the good of the consumer,” says one former Motorola executive. The men in the R&D labs are permitted to indulge their flights of fancy, many of which centre on fine-tuning antennas to optimise reception. Meanwhile, no one pays much attention to more prosaic fundamentals such as reliable software.

Another Motorola departee told Gizmodo that the company group charged with consumer research has been marginalised by the engineers, who dismiss its concerns–and, to a large extent, its very existence–as inconsequential. “With the engineers,” he said, “there’s this attitude of, “I create–what do you do? You pick out colours?’”

The engineers could theoretically be kept in check by corporate managers, but few suits are bold enough to act. A Motorola insider noted that long-serving managers have “deity status” at the company–no matter how many of their products flop, they never suffer repercussions.

The RAZR, a design victory as much as an engineering one, only came about due to the gumption of chief marketing office Geoffrey Frost. Following the RAZR’s overnight success, Moto commissioned an in-house team to research the company’s next step. Countless hours were spent pulling together focus-group studies and carrier feedback, but it was all for naught–the research was simply ignored by Motorola’s top brass. “They have this attitude of, ‘Well, I’ve built phones for 20 years, I know what I’m doing,” says a frustrated member of that team, who noted that once Frost died in 2005, there was no one left with the chops and political capital to route around Moto’s stick-in-the-mud managers.

Motorola’s managerial bumbling has resulted in severe cultural malaise–a condition made worse by the mobile unit’s location in the deep Chicago suburbs, hardly a place awash in creative energy. (Few 22-year-old design wunderkinds are willing to forego the Bay Area in favour of Libertyville.)

Keep in mind, too, that Motorola was the birthplace of Six Sigma, a methodology meant to eliminate product defects. But Six Sigma was created in 1986, well before the era of ubiquitous mobiles; its focus is engineering, not end-user experience. The methodology is therefore unequipped to address many of the shortcomings that have irked so many customers.

Take, for example, the navigation joystick on the ill-fated first-gen ROKR. It looked cool and worked as intended, but not without minor headaches: The joystick was a hair too sensitive, making it too easy to scroll past your music selection. Or take the Q–relatively powerful, but why in heaven’s name didn’t it auto-capitalise address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste? Sure these may strike you as minor details, but minor details make the difference in a competitive handset market. And Motorola’s aging quality-control program wasn’t designed to catch such annoying foibles.

Six Sigma and its companion product-development methodology, dubbed “M-Gates,” both stress caution in the name of quality. But when it comes to innovation, there’s certainly such a thing as too much wariness. In planning its software path after the RAZR’s smashing success, Motorola knew (to its credit) that its Synergy OS was antiquated. But instead of developing a worthy successor, the company decided to wait around for Windows Mobile, ostensibly because it was a sure thing. Big mistake, as we all now know. Motorola next turned to Linux, which has never lived up to expectations. That’s left the company scrambling for replacements, a panic that has led to the striking of numerous deals with potential software partners–”throwing darts at a board,” as one former Motorola employee put it. It’s also meant that different generations of the same phone end up running completely different software–the RAZR2 3G, for example, runs on the old P2K OS, while the 2.5G variant uses Linux. Both are painfully slow.

Motorola can still find the way forward–this is, after all, a company that’s long done wondrous things in the lab. Surely it can figure out how to make its software work more fluidly, or realise that consumers actually care about such “trifling” issues as external volume rockers and intuitive menus.

Ex-employees are nearly unanimous in stating that bringing on Sanjay Jha as co-CEO (and designated handset-division savior) is a reasonable gamble. It’s been clear for months now that CEO Greg Brown is in way over his head. “He has no idea how to run a consumer electronics business,” grumbles one critic, adding that Brown’s previous job was at an enterprise software company. While Jha is well regarded for his operational prowess and sheer intelligence, it’s worth noting that he’s fresh off a 14-year run at Qualcomm. Did chipmaking really prepare Jha to address the needs of Joe Sixpack consumers?

Our contacts contend that Jha’s rescue plan needs to focus on two important areas–one technical, the other cultural. First, the company needs to streamline its wireless development, so that phone models are designed in conjunction with one another–thereby ending the lunacy of different generations featuring different (and inadequate) software. Second, there needs to be a reconciliation between the engineering heroes and the consumer research folks, who are currently out in the wilderness.

That can happen if Motorola opens its eyes to the very real design problems that plague generation after generation of its handsets. But does the company’s leadership have the will to really shake things up? Some curmudegeonly engineers and managers are going to resist with every fibre of their beings. May the Force be with you, Mr. Jha.

Gizmodo columnist Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and author of the Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier’s Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II.

The Price: US$199 (after 2-year contract)

The Verdict: Long story short, the hardware is great, the music interface is decent, the T-Mobile interface sucks. But let’s start with the good. Not only do I like build quality, and how the button layout changes according to the phone’s function, I also like that the haptic feedback really feels like the phone has buttons (Herrman is still convinced there aren’t haptics). As a music player, the capacitive ring and menu system give it an iPod sort of feel, which is nice. It’s pretty easy to use, and doesn’t suffer from much lag. Syncing with Windows Media Player is a relatively painless process, but that means it’s also Windows only (Mac Users have to transfer files via MicroSD, ugh).

The thing that makes me never want to touch the phone again is T-Mobile’s UI skin, which takes competent phone software and turns it into a laggy, unresponsive pile of crap. Seeing as this phone is a T-Mo exclusive, I think it’s important to highlight how much I dislike it. Frequently I try to enter into a menu for the camera, or text messages, only to be thrown back to the MyFaves home screen. After hitting another button in response, the phone decides it wants to go to the app I was originally trying to use, and then respond to my subsequent button pushing. The dialog boxes also like to clash with the menus, which allow for frequent input errors. I liken the process to playing voicemail tag with someone, which is to say it’s totally annoying.

Other than that, it’s just slow, the capacitive ring is no good for navigating the main menu, and trying D-pad feels cramped. So while I think the phone is an above average candybar, I’d hold out for a version running different software.

AU: Seeing as how the US guys only seem to hate the T-mobile side of things, I’ll get my hands on a local version in a few weeks and let you know what I think.

Given the fact that Motorola is using Hollywood to garner publicity for one of its products makes me think that they are not bowing out without a fight. Although *whispers* from a style point of view, fake iguana-skin boxes won’t increase sales in my book—what you need, Greg Brown, is a new interface and sexier, non-four-letter-upper-case-word handsets. [Electronista]

1.4″ 128×160 px 65K Color OLED display
Measures 90 × 48.6 × 16.4 mm
Weighs 87.5 grams
GSM850/900/1800/1900, GPRS/EDGE
2 megapixel camera (no autofocus, no flash)
1.8″ QVGA 240×320 px 262K colour internal display
MicroSD memory card slot
MP3 player
USB and Bluetooth stereo connectivity
Touch-sensitive keys.
But hey, I’m just a disgruntled Motorola user, so what do I know? [PC Pop via Unwired View]

These first shots of the Motorola Rokr E8 from zol.com.cn shows the unique keypad that Moto went with. Instead of regular keys, they’ve got little nubs that need to be back-illuminated. When you’re dialing, all the keys are lit; but when you’re playing music, the numbers are dimmed and only the music controls are bright. This could be even greater if the keys’ backlit images could change in the background, but it doesn’t seem like the E8 is advanced enough to do that. [Zol.com via IDNES via Phonearena]

It’s got RAZR2-like music controls, mini USB headphones (no 3.5mm jack), and the same round PEBL design. PhoneScoop is guessing that the “9″ in U9 will mean this is going to have 3G, like other 9-series phones from Motorola, but it’s still unconfirmed. [Phonescoop]