Motorola roks iPod's boat

TWO HANDSETS in particular have boosted Motorola's standing amongst mobile phone vendors - the Rokr E1 iTunes phone and the Razr ultra-thin phone. That's raised its global market share to 19 per cent.

Significantly Motorola is claiming to have sold 0.25 million Rokrs. Since it has only really been on sale for one month, does that mean it'll sell 6 million in a year? After all, it has already sold 6.5 million Razrs in Q3 and 12 million to date.

So those who have been predicting that music phones won't make a dent in the sales of MP3 players and iPods had better think again.

For the record Motorola has shipped 38.7 million handsets during Q3 2005 which is an amasing increase of 66 percent compared Q3 2004. It also reckons it gained a whole 1 per cent extra of global market share in Q3.

The breakdown of its new devices is also interesting: - five for iDEN style networks which Nextel champions compared to four for both GSM and CDMA networks. It also launched its Pebl and Slvr models after the quarter ended.

The news that it integrated new R&D teams in Europe and Asia to cater for platforms such as i-mode is intriguing. It isn't that big a player in i-mode - yet. µ