Engineers at Motorola are hard at work on a sophisticated handset—known internally as the "X phone"—but the Google Inc. unit is running into some obstacles in its effort to provide more potent competition for Apple Inc., said people familiar with the matter.

Seven months after being acquired by Google for $12.5 billion, Motorola is designing its marquee handset with cutting-edge features to stand apart from existing phones when it is released next year, these people said.

Yesterday’s high-end is the new midrange we like to say. The Nokia C6 has almost exactly the same features as the Nokia N97 mini but hangs a big Sale sign. Time to shop for high-end features off high street.
The C-series are trying to distill the Nokia knowledge and experience into a lineup of simple and affordable phones. There’s a bit of everything there: from cheap entry-level handsets to smartphones that border on the Eseries and Nseries.

Occasionally HTC takes a little break from high-end smartphones and dips its toes in the waters of the lower midrange. The HTC Wildfire is a down-sized, down-clocked and down-priced version of the HTC Desire. If Sony Ericsson can do it with the X10 mini, then HTC have all the right in the world to make a Desire mini too.