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In an alternate universe, Motorola is making weird Android phones for cops

In an alternate universe, Motorola is making weird Android phones for cops

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A few years ago, Motorola split into two parts. One of those parts made lots of things that Verge readers care about — phones, mainly — and ended up getting bought by Google before landing in Lenovo's lap. This is the part that makes things like the Moto X and the Moto 360. The other part, Motorola Solutions, is far easier to forget unless you're working in an industry that uses the businessy, infrastructure-y equipment that it manufactures.

Visiting Motorola Solutions' website is a bit like stepping into a bizarro world where Motorola continues to operate as an independent, Chicago-based company. It's still using Motorola's old branding: the old logo, the old typeface from back in the RAZR days, everything. The best part, though, is that Solutions makes a couple of smartphones. They're designed primarily for police, EMTs, firefighters, and the like — and they look absolutely nothing like the Moto X.

Moto L10 2

The Motorola LEX L10 has a 4.7-inch display, a huge push-to-talk button, LTE, and dual-SIM support — a popular feature in some countries, but not among consumer phones in the US. It kind of looks like a Nokia N9 from the front. It also has my favorite feature on any phone ever made, "Covert Mode," which "enables discreet, low-profile operation during surveillance missions at night." We should all be so lucky to have a job that requires that kind of badassery.

Motorola 700

Then there's the LEX 700, which is running Android 4.2.2. That's not KitKat (and it's certainly not Lollipop), but it's reasonably up-to-date for a brick that looks like it could've been manufactured in 2008. "Expect top-notch performance with a dual-core 1 GHz processor," the description reads. Needless to say, expectations are a little different for gadgets in the public safety industry.