Motorola invests in wireless HDTV developer Amimon
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Motorola Inc.  said on Tuesday  it had made an equity investment in privately held Amimon Inc.,  a developer of semiconductor technology for wireless  transmission of high-definition video.
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(InfoWorld) - Motorolaâs Greg Brown was channeling Winston Churchill last week when he announced his companyâs plans to take on the BlackBerry market with wireless devices for all manner of enterprise jobs. âWe will address the needs of mobile workers in the office, out in the field, in the factory, at retail, and across the supply chain,â said Brown, president of Motorolaâs network and enterprise business. Hey! What about âon the landing groundsâ? But big talk was the order of the day, as Brown tried to explain what Motorola hopes to do after it digests its $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies. Symbolâs stock and trade is handheld computers and bar-code scanners used to capture data in warehouses and factories. If you have signed for a UPS package recently, the chances are you did so on a Symbol device. Motorolaâs specialty, on the other hand, is WANs. The plan is to join the two and push more wireless data devices into all corners of the enterprise by cutting across devices, infrastructure, applications, and services, Brown said. âSymbolâs strength in capturing, moving, and managing data inside the building directly complements â¦ Motorolaâs network capabilities outside of the building,â Brown said. Motorola is already envisioning the types of products and services it will be able to offer. For example, Symbol is a leader in RFID, the short-range wireless technology that companies are just beginning to use to track products and assets. Motorola would like to expand RFIDâs reach by combining cellular, Wi-Fi, WiMax, and RFID in a way that can help enterprises track products throughout their lifecycles, spanning private networks inside offices and public networks outside, said Ed Zander, Motorolaâs chairman and chief executive. Symbol is developing wireless devices catering to various industries, such as medical, transportation, and retail. âI looked at all the devices and imagined the Wi-Fi and WiMax play,â Zander said. Motorola also sees opportunities in Symbolâs enterprise WLAN business. Symbol has deployed 45,000 such networks that will eventually need to be upgraded to higher speeds. And there are still lots of enterprises that have yet to install their first wireless networks, Zander added.
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Motorola Inc  is seeing a  strong boost from sales of set-top boxes for high-definition  television services, according to Dan Maloney, head of the  company's set-top box and network equipment unit.
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Motorola Inc. has agreed to buy MeshNetworks Inc., a developer of technology and products for rapidly deployed, self-creating wireless mobile networks.
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NTT DoCoMo is looking to boost its services to business users in Japan with a new, more advanced handset. It has signed a deal with Motorola to jointly develop a FOMA handset targeting business users and taking
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Motorola will partner with NTT DoCoMo, Japan&#39;s largest wireless carrier, to create a next-generation wireless handset based on DoCoMo&#39;s FOMA technology.
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Motorola Inc  on Thursday  unveiled a mobile media player that shows live television,  on-demand video clips and programming saved on digital video  recorders.
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Motorola Inc. , the world's  second-biggest handset maker, said on Monday it would develop  advanced mobile phones using chips from Texas Instruments Inc.  , the No. 1 wireless chip maker.
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Later this year, a few hundred US residents will be testing two such product lines made by Motorola that use MasterCard&#39;s PayPass wireless payment system, according to Motorola.
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Motorola Inc. MOT.N on Tuesday said   it agreed to buy Symbol Technologies Inc. SBL.N, a maker of   bar code and inventory scanning technology, for about $3.9   billion to boost sales of wireless handheld devices to   corporate customers.
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(InfoWorld) - The groundwork is being laid for a risky experiment in consumer electronics as manufacturers prepare for Sprint Nextel and Clearwire's Xohm WiMax service. Motorola unveiled a WiMax client chipset on Tuesday and praised Sprint's strategy of leaving WiMax clients to device makers and retailers. But that plan, a change of pace from U.S. carriers' usual practice of selling and subsidizing phones themselves, could take years to pay off in the mass market. The chipset, introduced at WiMax World USA in Chicago, is small, economical, and more power-efficient than 3G platforms, according to Gary Koerper, Motorola's vice president of platform planning and architecture. It will hit the market in client devices in the second half of 2008, with the company initially focusing on building WiMax phones that carry its own brand, he said. The devices will be offered for various WiMax services around the world, including Xohm. With Xohm, Motorola will have free rein to make whatever kind of device it wants as long as it's certified to work on the carrier's network, Koerper said. Motorola calls that great news, but some observers see a hard road ahead with device makers or carriers pushing an alternative to carrier-subsidized phones. "The model Sprint is pursuing is really taking the shackles off Motorola innovation and Motorola's brand," Koerper said. Typically, the world's second-largest mobile phone maker has to develop a new product and then get a carrier to buy in on it. With WiMax devices designed to work with Xohm, Motorola can look straight to the consumer and build what they want. This could make it easier for Motorola to compete with Apple's hot iPhone, he said. Apple's product has stolen the thunder from Motorola's popular Razr line even though it commands a full, unsubsidized price. Sprint's whole WiMax initiative is a risky bid to gain an edge in the U.S. mobile market, where Sprint is in third place by subscribers. The technology promises a fat pipe to the Internet that subscribers can take with them all over a metropolitan area. Motorola said its chipset offers 10Mbps downstream and 3 to 4Mbps upstream, far faster than current 3G and comparable to a cable modem. But it will take more than fast Internet access to attract and keep paying customers, said Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research. There are other ways to get fast data service, and there will be more in the future, so Sprint needs to create attractive services such as a VoIP application, high-quality video content, and easy tools for professionals to access corporate networks over VPNs, Lin said. Ease of use, support, and coverage will also be key because cellular services already have those established, he added. "You don't automatically get hundreds of thousands of early adopters," Lin said. The lack of a subsidy isn't even the biggest concern for vendors trying to sell devices for such a service, but it is a long-term problem, he said. Although down from about 95 percent a few years ago, the percentage of phones sold with subsidies in the U.S. is still 85 percent or more, according to Lin. Worldwide, about half of all cell phones are sold with subsidies, he said. As people look for more special features on their phones, they are looking outside of carriers' offerings more often, but it will be three years before the average U.S. consumer will want an unsubsidized phone, Lin predicted. Len Lauer, an executive vice president at mobile technology giant Qualcomm, was also pessimistic in an interview earlier this year. He doesn't think the mobile industry can be transformed by new strategies like Sprint's nor by the any-device, any-service band planned for the 700MHz wireless spectrum to be auctioned next year. U.S. consumers are too addicted to subsidies to buy many devices sold outside the carrier channel, said Lauer, a former Sprint executive. Motorola is pitching its chipset as competitive with 3G instead of an expensive, futuristic new technology. The cost of the chipset is already low and will keep falling to the point that Motorola could soon bring the chipset to inexpensive phones to be used primarily for voice in developing markets, Koerper said. The chipset, consisting of a baseband modem and a radio reference design, has been tested and verified with WiMax network infrastructure from Motorola and other leading vendors, the company said.
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Motorola has seen a 'tremendous increase' in sales of set-top boxes for HDTV services.
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Aiming to expand its position outside the cellphone market, Motorola is acquiring a leading maker of scanners and other wireless technology.
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Motorola Inc. is acquiring MeshNetworks Inc., a developer of a Wi-Fi based technology in which a person&#39;s mobile device doubles as a network relay point that can transmit a signal between other devices.
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Motorola Inc. , the world's second-largest maker of mobile phones, agreed to buy Symbol Technologies Inc. for $3.9 billion to expand into the market for handheld retail bar-code scanners.
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Motorola Inc. MOT.N on Tuesday said   it had agreed to buy Symbol Technologies Inc. SBL.N, a maker   of bar code and inventory scanning technology, for about $3.9   billion in cash to expand its opportunities with corporate   customers.
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Motorola wants to position itself for digital-home revolution. Part of the strategy: buying Netopia.