Last year has seen Motorola losing
significant mobile phone market share against Nokia and Samsung. They have also
come under fire from the industry and consumers for not being able to repeat
the success of the RAZR phones with their later models.
What about these latest phones? How do they
measure up?
The ROKR E8 is of course a music phone that
comes with a virtual keypad with haptic feedback. Different buttons are
highlighted to indicate which function is being used. Other functions include a
2 megapixel camera, A2DP Bluetooth and 2GB internal memory with a microSD card
slot.
Sadly it only has EDGE connectivity. What
happened to 3G and HSDPA or even WiFi? Pricing has yet to be announced. Perhaps
with an attractive price it could be a hit. It should be in Asia
by the end of the first quarter.
The Z10 looks like it belongs in the RIZR
family, having a similar form factor and the kickback slide action with the
RIZR Z8. Motorola claims that this phone is the ultimate video phone and could
very well be a filmmaker’s companion gear. Very much like what Nokia told us
when they launched the Nokia N93.
It has video editing tools onboard and
enough storage for a 24-hour long footage. It also runs on a TI OMAP processor
with Symbian OS 9.2. As for it video capability, it has a 3.2 megapixel camera
with video capture of 30fps but only in QVGA resolution. Other than that it has
HSDPA connectivity and is able to support up to 32GB microSD card.
Both phones seem to be heading in the right
direction in terms of technology and the Z10 appears very interesting.
Aside from the phones, Soundbuzz will be
integrated into MOTOMUSIC to expand its services beyond China, into Southeast Asia,
India and Australia.
Motorola said that their MOTOMUSIC has proved to be a hit in China and by
leveraging on Soundbuzz they hope their music portal will reach new markets.
According to Soundbuzz, they sell more than
200,000 online music downloads and 3 million mobile downloads every month. They
also partnered with Hutchison 3, Motorola, Airtel, SingTel, M1, Optus Zoo,
Telstra/ BigPond Music, Microsoft (Windows Media Player 10), Creative
Technology and Sony BMG.
Before you decide to check them out, make
sure you are using Internet Explorer as the website does not support other
browsers including Mozilla Firefox and Opera. A tiny problem that Motorola
should perhaps rectify before integrating with Soundbuzz.
