Motorola tried to square up to recent hard times with a series of announcements from product launches and contract wins to brokered alliances and games.
The announcements made last week at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, include the launch of a five-strong portfolio of handsets, a partnership with CodeOnline to introduce two popular games (Trivial Pursuit and Who Wants to be A Millionaire), and an alliance with Trintech to develop the Motorola m-Wallet. Motorola also announced an office solution to allow users access to the Internet from a WAP-enabled phone and a $7 million contract to expand GPRS and WAP in the Republic of Georgia.
“Motorola’s innovative content contributions and dedication to application development means it will play a key role in bringing the mobile Internet to life even beyond its solid foundation in handsets and infrastructure,” said the company in a press release.
The new handsets include:
Tri-band Timeport-allows users to switch between data mode and voice, includes TrueSync software which synchronizes data between phone, PC, PDA and other devices;
Accompli 008-all-in-one phone with large touch screen, handwriting recognition in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Chinese;
Motorola V66-a small triband phone.
Motorola V120-with advance text messaging features; and the
Talkabout 192-with animated screen savers, icons and iTAP predictive texting.
The company’s entertainment applications also include an alliance with Creature Labs to offer the world-famous Sea-Monkey brand. Motorola also has partnered with T-Mobil to launch “Virtual Pet,” which allows customers to choose one of three virtual pet dogs.
The m-wallet application lets customers purchase goods using WAP or GPRS.
The GPRS contract in the Republic of Georgia is with the local company Magticom through Cisco Systems.
“Magticom is taking a deliberate migration plan to third-generation network technology, and Motorola is pleased to provide the infrastructure, applications, services and system solutions needed to support Magticom’s customer needs,” said Chris Gilbert, corporate vice president and general manger of Motorola’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
