Motorola announced the launch of the Motofone earlier this week. In a bid to keep one step ahead of it’s rivals Nokia in high-growth emerging markets, this is Motorola’s thinnest phone yet.
Slowing growth in Western Europe and the US has made suppliers turn to low penetration markets in the East such as India and China.
Having been attracting customers with it’s slim RAZR line, Motorola is hoping to continue the trend with a phone that costs less to produce and is even thinner.
With about 2 billion handsets in the world Ron Garriques, the head of Motorola’s handset division told investors that “Today is about is how we get to 5 billion units in the industry,”.
With Motorola steadily catching up with Nokia, they are particular keen to dent the Finnish giant’s number one position in high growth markets.
Garriques stated that the company would be improving it’s distributioun channels also added “We must go out there and disrupt the high growth markets,”.
The first of a new slim phone design platform known as the SCPL, the Motofone is 9mm thick, nearly 5mm thinner than the RAZR, and has already received an order from one carrier for 500 000 units, although pricing for the unit has not been discussed.
The phone boasts a new screen that can be viewed clearly even in bright sunlight, and new features including local language voice commands aimed at helping users who cannot read.
Given that 80% of the world’s mobile network is based on GSM the first version of the Motofone will work on this technology. This will be followed in Q1 by a CDMA version, a wirelss technology currently used in the US and some parts of Asia. This is in addition to plans for two new CDMA phones aimed at the mass market.
The new phones may be shipped to India first but this has not yet been decided.
Motorola intorduced several new phones in the RAZR line. The KRZR is a flip phone like the RAZR but is thinner, the RIZR has a sliding mechanism, and is also thinner than the RAZR.
They have also introduced the RAZR Maxx and the RAZR XX for downloading music and video over high speed networks.