Nextel phones are notoriously ugly. The company has never worried much about the appearance of their phones, since they were mainly intended for the construction site. They were instead more concerned about a phone that was almost mil-spec in its toughness. The good news (at least for Nextel subscribers) is that they are starting to move away from this brick phone style design, and more towards a sleeker, sexier look.

Gesture controls for phones (or any other gadgets) sound like a great idea on paper. “Wow,” you think, “I can shake my phone to change the song! That’s so convenient!”

So you get your phone, you load your songs, and you shake. Shake. New song! Shake. New song! A day or two goes by, and it hits you like a breakdancer’s foot to the face: you can shake your phone around and make everyone around you think you’ve got a twitch – or you could just press the “Next” button.

There it is folks, in all of its e-ink keypad glory: the Samsung Alias 2. Rumors indicated that this guy was set for release on May 11th, and the fact that shots of it have started to trickle out lead us to believe that the retail spots have begun to receive their units. Expect to see this guy hit shelves next week.

Looks like we’ve got a twofer, folks. Just as I predicted, Android adds the special fairy dust to feature phones that will make them appealing to a mass audience and Moto seems to know it. This phone, code-named “Ironman,” looks to be Moto’s latest foray into the world of high performance Android phones.

Just like Krusty the Clown, David Beckham will endorse damn near anything, provided the price is right. That helps explain this latest promotional video, wherein the benched AC Milan (via LA Galaxy) midfielder holds, quite masculinely, the Motorola Aura, the $2,000 cellphone that nobody wants.

Whoa-ho-ho! Way to keep these releases on lock, MetroPCS! Striking while the iron is luke warm, they’ve released the Motorola QA30, a mere six months after it first became available.

Remember Motorola? They used to make phones. Anyway, co-CEO Sanjay K. Jha (the other CEO is Batman, but you never see Sanjay and Batman in the same room so…) works for the company and apparently spent most of last year and all of this year fishing, taking dance classes, and spending time with his kids because Motorola has done fuck-all to save itself in the face of high-powered feature-phone competitors like LG and Samsung let alone Palm which, just fifteen minutes ago, was ready to croak.

Motorola has been talking about making a USB device capable of moving your video and other media via WiFI and bluetooth since last year, and they are continuing to talk about it. They aren’t talking about when it will be released or how much it will cost, but they are talking about what it’ll do.

Long time MobileCrunch readers may know that I have a bit of an aversion to Motorola. They’ve never done anything wrong to me, personally – it’s just that every handset they’ve released in the past 4 years is a mundane, haphazard piece of garbage. However, I’m glad (though a bit reluctant) to say that they’ve strayed from this path with the Evoke QA4; it has its flaws – but as far as phones that tiptoe the line between smartphone and featurephone go, the QA4 seems pretty nifty. Check out our impressions and the full hands-on demo video after the jump.

Today, like everyone else, Motorola announced a brand new handset to showcase at CTIA this week. The Evoke QA4 features a 2.8-inch touch-screen, slide-out 12-key pad and a touch-screen QWERTY. The handset is enhanced with widgets for RSS feeds, MySpace or YouTube. Also equipped with a full HTML browser and accelerometer, the Evoke evokes memories of all the other touch-screen handsets to come out in the last two years.

The Moto RUSH 2 confuses us a bit. It’s not exactly gorgeous, but it’s not terribly ugly. It doesn’t look dirt cheap, but it doesn’t look like something we’d expect to pay more than $99 bucks out the door for. One of the product shots implies it has a touchscreen (note the on-screen dialer), but it’s a tiny one. It’s as if Motorola set out to make the most average phone they could.

The Moto Dev Group (not Motorola) previously stated that the company is fully committed to Android development and now it seems the company is working diligently getting the OS functional on an e-ink display. So far the development guys have succeeded on a proof of concept device, but it’s still far from production quality. Android’s open source code and e-inks low power consumption could be match made in heaven if the two can work nicely together.

Motorola lost $3.6 billion last quarter with revnue of $7.14 billion, 26 percent down from the same time last year. The biggest decline was in mobile phones with a 51 percent decline in revenue.

After far too much time spent offering nothing but clunky brickphones and one of the ugliest phones we’ve ever seen, Boost Mobile is finally bringing out something worth putting next to your face: the Motorola i9.

Looks like Motorola will be pairing a keyboard with push-to-talk in the i465, due sometime this year. The immediacy of text messaging is great, yes, overshadowed only by the immediacy of instantly speaking to someone using a nationwide walkie-talkie, so this handset ought to cover all the need-to-talk-ASAP bases.

Really? This is getting out of hand, no? The onslaught of Obama clad doodads has begun. This stuff is going to sell like hotcakes!

New to Motorola’s stable of handsets – the Moto DWNSZR. Motorola has just announced it is cutting 4,000 jobs in its handset division.

Every year around CES time we get a slew of emails describing the thinnest this or most of that. A few years ago it was GPS devices (”The most points-of-interest in Scranton!”) and then it was TVs (witness Samsung’s recent announcement of a 7mm thick TV). Now it’s green. Take the Renew for example.

Through an alliance with CarbonFund(TM), Motorola offsets the energy required to manufacture, distribute and operate the phone through investments in renewable energy sources and reforestation. The plastic housing of MOTO W233 is 100 percent recyclable and made from plastics comprised of recycled water bottles, and the packaging was also created with the environment in mind.

100 percent recyclable? So is everything, given enough processing. Plastic comprised of recycled water bottles? Want a cookie? What about the 5 million RAZRs now paving the bottom of countless rivers? Environmental packaging? If you stuff the thing into a bag made of fruit roll-ups, I’ll go along with you. Otherwise, weak sauce.

Even if they offset their carbon credits with the good wood elves of Sylvan Glade, this is still a phone and it will still end up in a filthy landfill picked over by the poorest of the poor in rural China. Once everyone figures out that they can sell a few carbon credits to get the “Carbon Neutral” seal of approval on their box, they’ll hop on the bandwagon. But don’t worry! Everyone and their dog will be offering the biggest this, the smallest that, and the greenest of the other.