Motorola re-invents the Razr

AN EMBATTLED Ed Zander, Motorola's CEO, has just launched a new family of second generation Razr phones in an effort to shore up the company's rapidly declines fortunes and market share.

As if to rub salt in Motorola's wounds, Nokia said recently that it expected its market share in Q2 2007 to go above the current level of about 36 per cent.

Analysts immediately assumed that Nokia was making reference to Motorola's weakness by making such a comment.

But are they all barking up the wrong tree? The new Razr ² phones are aimed at the high margin end of developed markets.

But if you look at which handsets are attempting to steal this ground, it looks like LG may have an advantage.

According to independent analyst, Jayker Shah, the handsets playing in this niche will be the Nokia N95; RIM's Blackberry Pearl and 8700; Samsung's X830 and P310; Sony Ericsson's W880i and the Apple Iphone.

Against this LG has the Prada, the Shine and the Chocolate. "From this I anticipate that LG is going to be a big market share winner in the next six months though its brand may have less affinity.

The LG brand is still below the other competitors on the 'cool' scale so co-branding with Prada was a very smart move," Shah told the INQ.

There are actually going to be three models in the Razr ² range. The V9 (3G HSDPA), V9m (EVDO CDMA) and V8 (GSM).

The first of these should appear by Jul 2007. One of the benefits is that the V8 has a completely redesigned user interface.

More importantly Motorola claims with the new ARM 11 processor, processing speed is going to be 10 times faster than the original Razr.

Plus with high-speed USB 2.0 it will only takes two to three seconds to transfer a song.

Another good reason why LG might benefit from Motorola's woes is, of course, that it is a major vendor of cdmaOne handsets - a sector where Nokia has decided it doesn't really need to play. µ