Monday, March 26, 2007

Motorola Bails - Helio, AirG, and Music Phone Sails

Last week Motorola CEO Ed Zander announced he would be bailing out on the wireless industry's annual trade show in Orlando, Fla. Turns out he had bigger issues on his mind--like slumping sales and profits.

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At CTIA, virtual carrier Helio, a joint venture of Earthlink and Korea's SK Telecom, will show off "Ocean," it's latest handset.

The phone, which slides two ways to reveal either a normal keypad or a full QWERTY keyboard, supports over-the-air music downloads in addition to other features like 2-gigabyte expansion capabilities for media storage, stereo speakers and video streaming.

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Music-phone ownership almost quadrupled from January 2006 to January 2007 in the U.S., according to research firm M:Metrics.

And while only 17% of U.S. subscribers own music phones, they seem to like them: about one-third of those subscribers now use their phone as their primary music device.

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AirG, which provides social networking features for carriers like Boost Mobile and Sprint, says it's grown to about 12 million U.S. users--some 6% of the total U.S. mobile subscriber base.

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excerpt: Gadgets, Geeks, Gators (Fortune).

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