LAS VEGAS-Motorola Inc. announced plans to commercially introduce the SC3160 phone, a
new entry-level Code Division Multiple Access wireless phone at the Consumer Electronics Show here last week.
Commercial availability in the Americas for the SC3160 is slated for the first quarter, said Motorola.
Pagers
showcased
Motorola also introduced several new paging products at CES, including an upgraded version of its two-
way pager, called the PageWriter 2000X.
The new pager has three times the memory capacity of the previous
model, up to 3.25 megabytes, so it can hold a much larger number of contact list entries and various software
applications. According to Amy Kabcenell, market development and training manager for Motorola’s North American
Paging Subscriber division, the company is hoping to attract more third-party developers to write applications for the
new device, and believes this added memory capacity will aid in that effort.
Motorola was previewing the 2000X at
CES, with expectations to have it commercially available this summer.
Also previewed at the show was a new card
to add paging capabilities to Windows CE powered handheld devices called the CF1350. According to Steve Shapiro,
senior marketing manager for Motorola’s Paging Products group, the new card functions much like the Synapse Pager
Card, developed for the Palm series of handheld organizers, except it is for WCE devices and can operate over several
paging carriers’ networks.
Shapiro said the new card is designed to accept text and numeric one-way messaging.
Only handheld devices built specifically to process these paging signals will be able to make use of the information,
though. In other words, the pager card is the receiver for the paging signals, but for the numeric or text information to
come on screen, the device itself must be configured to make sense of that information.
The first manufacturer to
release such a wireless-ready handheld device is Hewlett Packard CO., with its Jornada 42, displayed at the Motorola
booth along with the new pager card.
The CF1350 is expected to be available this summer as an after-market
product, retailing in the high $100 range, said Shapiro.
