Pictures of the Motorola ROKR U9 (above), U3 and W5 have been released, along with a few completely underwhelming specs. As you can see from the pics, the new ROKRs are simply Motorola KRZRs and PEBLs with a paint job (now where’ve seen that before?!). The specs are simply awful as well.

More pics and specs of the new Motorola ROKRs after the jump.

The ROKR U9 will come with a small 1.4″ 160 x 128 OLED external display, 2 megapixel camera, still-small 1.8″ QVGA internal screen, and the rest of the usual mobile phone gubbins (USB, Bluetooth, etc.).

The ROKR W9 (above) is a quad-band clamshell with 1.9″ screen, 20MB of storage and 1.3 megapixel camera.

The ROKR U3 (below), meanwhile, fairs even worse, offering a VGA camera.

Frankly, I can’t believe that in 2007 I’m writing about a new Motorola phone that comes with a VGA camera! At a time when all the other mobile companies are releasing 5 megapixel monsters with full auto-focus, optical zoom and image correction software, Motorola still seem to thinkk that 2001 technology is what the market wants.

As for the design – yeesh! The KRZR never looked great anyway, but adding a few “funky”decals to it is not going to sell it any faster.

Is it me, or is Motorola following the same worrying path as MG Rover, the UK’s last large-scale motoring manufacturer? MG Rover was losing money hand over fist, and had no new money to design new cars. So all it did, every year, was release the same model with a few tweaks here and there; a new paint job here, a fresh grille there, culminating in the Rover 200 Streetwise, which was simply a Rover 200 decorated to look like a 4×4, but which was nothing of the sort.

It looked awful, had such poor features that it made an old Trabant look like a BMW, and was the prelude to MG Rover collapsing into ignominious bankruptcy.

Now I’m not arguing that Motorola will go the same way, but there’s a disturbing parallel between the two companies’ marketing efforts, with Motorola not coming up with anything new, and simply repainting existing designs and trying to flog them as “new” models.

The new ROKRs wouldn’t have been so bad had it not been for Motorola’s executives proudly claiming earlier last week that the company will be looking to innovate in the future and coming up with some phones to be proud of. Guess we’re still waiting for those then!

[Source: Engadget]