Motorola Barrage V860 out-of-stock, and with an earpiece problem?

2. Knightlyjay posted on 08 Oct 2009, 11:43 0 0

Knuckle, the Barrage is essentially the 750 in Iden armor. The folks at Motorola design, engineer and build both, so the quality should or could be similar. It isn't that Verizon doesn't do rugged handsets, or that At&T can't either, it may be that Moto (who makes all of the handsets in this discussion, doesn't seem to have much cross team deployment. Depending on how the discussion went with VZW about the Barrage, they could have argued that a costlier handset could be sold to the consumer if shown to be just as good and just as tough as the Idens. I also wonder (just had this thought) if Moto has some sort of hidden agreement with Nextel that any non iden handset it makes can't be quite as tough or good as the Idens. Hmm? I respect the Iden handsets, I wish that Big Red or the Orange and Blue globe had as good a product available for them.

4. knuckleballer34 posted on 08 Oct 2009, 13:35 0 0

Good point Jay. Something must be amiss at Motorola for their iDEN "rugged" handsets to be better designed/constructed than their other PTT devices. I personally had the Tundra before, and it was as good as any iDEN Motorola i've had. The Barrage might just be a lemon for all anyone knows. But i'm with you; I would think that Motorola has to have some kind of exclusive deal with Nextel and the other iDEN carriers. Maybe since Motorola technicians invented iDEN, they don't want to make too many non iDEN PTT phones so their technology won't go under. That's my best guess. If At&t and Verizon offered 4-5 really good Motorola PTT models, i'm sure they would cipher a decent amount of Nextel customers. Thank you for the comment!

6. Dave Lister posted on 08 Oct 2009, 16:05 0 0

Don't you think you're going a little overboard? Reporting a potential issue with a phone is hardly "VZW bashing".

7. knuckleballer34 posted on 08 Oct 2009, 21:11 0 0

Good point. You could argue it's Motorola and not Verizon. I do agree though that Verizon is widely targeted on this website. There are way too many Apple fanboys on here.