Motorola Inc. marked its Smart Networks Developers Forum in New Orleans last week with partnerships and new product initiatives.
Far away in Oman, the company signed a $5.2 million contract to expand a GSM digital cellular system in the country.
Under the deal which takes off in the second half of this year, Motorola will deploy its Horizonmacro digital base stations to provide extra capacity for up to 20,000 cellular subscribers there.
Back in New Orleans, Motorola allied with Nextel Communications Inc., VoiceStream Wireless Corp., Power X and Green Hills Software to enable business competitions and roll out solutions for the wireless space.
Motorola and Nextel are co-sponsoring a contest to challenge developers to create innovative local and network-aware applications using Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition technology.
The contest, known as the Motorola/Nextel Developer Challenge, will take place June 4-6 this year at Sun Microsystems Inc.’s annual JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco. The winners will take home a BMW Z3 2.5i-roadster and Motorola 185s handsets with Nextel service.
With VoiceStream Wireless Corp., Motorola announced the release of new V. series Personal Communicator Model V100 and the launch of Ping Pong wireless Internet text messaging service. The V100 features a full keyboard and oversized display for fast and easy text messaging with a full-featured wireless phone.
Green Hills Software is partnering with Motorola to create the Alliance for Product Technology to enable faster time to market for customers that purchase StarCore-based digital signal processors from Motorola. Green Hills intends to develop, market and distribute advanced software development tools for the product.
From product initiatives, Motorola announced it will license and integrate memory stick technology as a new peripheral to its DragonBall mobile data solutions portfolio. The memory stick peripheral helps design engineers to create products that transfer, store, organize and use digital information like digital photos and music files between computers, cameras and players, PDAs, smart phones and other Internet applications.
Another product Motorola announced was the RF Power Mosfet, a device that is optimized for 1.0 GHz base station applications.
“Design activity for sub 1.0 GHz applications continues to be very robust,” said Lynelle McKay, director of RF operations for Motorola’s networking and computing systems group.
Also thrown into the mix is the WarpLink MC92610 Quad 2.5-gigabit transceiver, a product Motorola is producing to lower power consumption and overall system cost for data transfer operations in high-speed data networking applications.
“The MC92610 is designed to meet our customers’ requirements for higher performance equipment backplanes, and do it simpler, sooner and with lower power,” said Brian Wilkie, corporate vice president and general manager for Motorola’s computing platform division.
Motorola also announced three other products including the 56321 networking digital signal processor, silicon germanium family of high-end timing solutions and enhanced power and functionality for its PowerQUICC II family of integrated solutions.
The DSP56321 works for wireless digital cellular base stations, the PowerQUICC II works with telecom switching equipment and cellular base stations and the Silicon Germanium family of solutions enable the design of high-performance digital systems with minimum clock skew across multiple devices and clock sequences.
“Over the past several years, the market for timing solutions has grown rapidly worldwide,” said John Fairholme, director of operations for Motorola’s timing solutions.
