Why when just a few years ago the race was to create a smaller, cuter handset is the biggest push now back toward the largest device with the most controls on the interface? That's what we have with the three hot news announcements of BlacBerry-knockoff smartphones coming from Motorola, Nokia and palm in the Q, E61 and 700p respectively. I mean, are busy people taking over the world or something? What happened to teens and their music collections? Just kidding.

Seriously, the QWERTY Wars are on this summer. Interestingly the race has been toward the slimmest, but the form factors remain quite wide, making them less than easily portable in a pocket. Perhaps because they are primarily designed for the US market, it's all about display culture--wearing the device externally so everyone can see just what your "status" is: important, busy, connected, needed.

As for the Q, possibly the most anticipated, it takes Motorola into new territory. It apparently is coming to Verizon only, with the company rumored to have secured an exclusive contract. The blogosphere has been buzzing with additional rumors that it is not launching next week as expected, that it won't have push-mail capabilities, and that it won't have Mobile Office as anticipated. Oh yeah, and there's the issue of differing announcements from Verizon and Moto regarding its availability. If it's all just a big buzz campaign, it's poorly run. I can't recall a viral marketing effort that was based on competing rumors about a device's impending disappointments, rather than possible earthshattering new features.

The Palm 700p? What can you say. It's a Treo. It has had good early reports, but some valid rants about the lack of WiFi, which has been stripped from the E61 as well. But then again, if operators started doing right by customers, who knows where it might lead?

[Update: Ian at DigitalEvangelist rightly points out that we neglected to mention the M600, shown first at 3GSM, which is also due out this summer. I think I forgot it because I had just written about its Chinese version below in the SonyEricsson release sweep)