Motorola To Make All Models Web-Ready
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By Brett Young
Reuters
HANOVER, Germany (Feb. 24) - Motorola said on Thursday it would focus on bringing new Internet services to its customers and by year-end all its new handsets will be able to access the Internet.
The world's second largest mobile phone maker also unveiled six new models, including the world's first cellphone using General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) technology allowing faster data transfer speeds and always-on Internet connection.
'We see huge value in the long term for (mobile Internet) applications,' Dominic Strowbridge, Motorola's technology marketing manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told Reuters in an interview at the CeBIT technology fair.
'By the end of the year every phone we build will be Internet-enabled, and in 2001, 100 percent of the handsets we produce will be Internet-enabled,' he said.
MOTOROLA LAUNCHES WEB SITES TO ACCOMPANY PHONES
The new models for Motorola's three consumer brands -- Talkabout, Timeport and V. series -- will all be Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled. WAP will let Internet content to be viewed on the displays.
The company said the GPRS phone will be available in volumes in the third quarter of 2000, with other WAP models to be rolled out through the first three quarters.
Motorola also announced content agreements with 19 companies including Amazon.com, saying it aimed to bring this figure to 500 in the near future, and launched three Web sites to cater to each of its brands' new phones.
'We have created companion Web sites for the different phones so we can bring the content providers to the end-user,' Strowbridge said.
'We have 19 partners with loads of applications and our users will have instant access to them,' he said.
Strowbridge said Motorola might also in future consider providing its own content for customers, but only if it saw gaps that other providers were not filling.
PERSONALIZED APPROACH
Strowbridge said Motorola, former world number one in handsets, had learned a lesson from its bruising battle with market leader Nokia. That saw Motorola's global market share fall 2.6 percentage points to 16.9 percent in 1999 according to Gartner Group's Dataquest.
Nokia's market share at end-1999 was 26.9 percent, up 3.4 percentage points year-on-year.
'The biggest change is that we have started to build phones for someone, not just anyone,' he said, referring to the wide segmentation in the market.
He said the focus on personalizing models led to the drive to boost content, as customers would focus on this rather than the technology behind it.
'The Web without wires is what we are trying to do. WAP is just an enabler,' he said. 'People couldn't give a damn (about the technology), they just want the services.'
Reuters 17:28 02-24-00 |
