Motorola has fallen on tough times. The once mighty mobile arm of the electronics company, the same division that delivered the world’s first flip mobile phone has become a bit player in the world mobile scene.

The Motorola Aura demonstrates why.

The Aura is pitched as being “high fashion” with a high price tag: $2,000. For it you get a circular screen, a clamshell design that rotates 180 degrees, and a pile of unimpressive specs.

For your $2,000 you get GSM + Edge access, so no 3G, 2GB of internal memory, and a 2mb camera. Oh, but the lens is created from Grade 1 62-carat sapphire crystal, and has a custom-engineered rotating mechanism with 130 precision ball bearings that drive the assisted-opening blade, or as Motorola describes it “like opening the door on a high-end luxury car.”

Here’s a demo video from MobileBurn taken at CES. Given most celebs and smart people are using iPhone’s or Blackberry’s, somehow we just can’t see this phone taking off.

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Netgear has announced a standalone internet TV box imaginatively titled the “Netgear Internet TV Player” or ITV2000 at this years CES.

While internet boxes for television sets aren’t new (my Apple TV gets a good daily workout), it’s the extras it offers that makes it a winner.

On top of access to video sites such as YouTube (pretty much standard these days), Google Video, Metacafe, Veoh, Daily Motion, NBC, Reuters, CNN and more, the box also supports BitTorrent and live online television.

BitTorrent built in is naturally exciting most people; TorrentFreak has more in that regard. It’s nice to have, but if it’s not a killer feature for me; if you’re prepared to download content via BitTorrent, most would find the syncing process onto a box not that hard to begin with.

Where this completely rocks is the inclusion of live online television.

There’s thousands of live feeds online today, but precious little way to access them outside of a computer. A plugin years back did bring some of these to the Windows Media Center, but that presumed you had a WMC box attached to your television (I did for a while). Bringing these feeds to a television is like offering Cable or Pay TV, but for free. Sure, you can’t get everything you might want to watch, but there’s still plenty to choose from, and it’s a great selling point.

The ITV2000 is due out in the Northern summer with an affordable price of $200.

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