Motorola Mobile Phones

The Motorola DEXT is an Android mobile phone featuring MOTOBLUR, an innovative solution that serves up a customised mix of emails and social networking content (eg Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) to the phone’s home screen in a single, combined feed.

Following initial set up, MOTOBLUR handles everything automatically - from logging in to social networks to fetching continuous updates and making backups to a secure server.

The handset has both a 3.1″ touch screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Other headline features include a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, assisted GPS, 3G and WiFi connectivity (802.11b/g), a music player with a 3.5mm audio headset jack and up to 32GB of removable memory.

The Motorola DEXT comes with pre-loaded applications including Google Maps and, when bought in the UK through Orange (see link right), Orange Maps.

More Motorola DEXT features and specifications:

- Up to 6 hours talktime & 13.5 days standby time
- Geo-tagging of photos
- Email: POP3 / IMAP embedded plus support for MS Exchange synchronisation
- Android WebKit web browser
- Android 1.5 (Cupcake) operating system
- MOTOBLUR with Happenings, Status & Messaging widgets and customisable RSS news widgets
- MOTOBLUR synchronisation of personal and work contacts and social networks
- Video and audio capture and playback
- Size: 114 x 58 x 15.6mm
- Weight: 163g
- MicroSD memory up to 32GB

The Motorola DEXT has a UK launch date of Q4 2009 on the Orange mobile phone network.

Earlier this month, Motorola launched an LTE (Long Term Evolution) trial network and testing facility at its laboratory in Swindon, Wiltshire - already an established centre of excellence for GSM base station transceiver (BST) development.

The lab will enable the UK’s mobile network operators to conduct field trials and real world equipment testing using LTE technology, which is described by Motorola as delivering “true mobile broadband, giving users a personalised, affordable media experience at home and while on the go”.

If you really want the technical detail (be careful what you wish for), LTE is described by Motorola as being based on “orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), a next-generation radio frequency technology that has high spectral efficiency, and utilizes an all-IP flat architecture, resulting in a much increased capacity and a lower cost per bit that enables the delivery of mobile broadband services to the mass market”.

A more digestible explanation would be to say that the new LTE facility forms part of Motorola’s work towards implementing 4G mobile technologies – or to put it even more succinctly: delivering more content at lower cost!

In financial results revealed on 3 February 2009, Motorola announced sales for its Mobile Devices segment during 2008 of $12.1 billion – a 36% fall compared to 2007. Profits were also down, with Mobile Devices losing $2.2bn in 2008 versus $1.2bn in 2007.

On the plus side, Motorola announced positive progress on smartphones, with a next generation of devices scheduled for launch in Q4 of 2009. Sanjay Jha, CEO of Mobile Devices, reaffirmed Motorola’s commitment to aggressive development of innovative new products and also announced plans to further reduce the segment’s cost structure.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, Motorola launched a total of 15 new phones – one 3G, six GSM, five CDMA and three iDEN mobile phones. In the same quarter, it shipped a total of 19.2m handsets globally, giving Motorola an estimated 6.5% global market share for new handsets.