Motorola plans movie-playing mobile phones

SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) - Motorola Inc. is set to unveil a mobile phone with full-motion video display and the means to play feature films on small removable storage cards, Chief Executive Ed Zander said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Software 2007 conference in Silicon Valley, Zander briefly described one of the several devices the world's second-largest mobile phone maker has said it plans to announce at an event next Tuesday.

"We are going to show a device next week," Zander told several hundred attendees of the business software conference, saying it would show 30 frames-a-second, full-motion video. "It is a media monster."

The new device would initially be targeted at the European market, where faster, so-called "third generation" (3G) networks are more widely available than in Motorola's home U.S. market.

Zander also said Motorola has partnered with another company that can fit feature-length movies on so-called Secure Digital (SD) cards capable of storing several gigabytes, or billions of bytes, of data.

If widely adopted, such cards could provide a new form of mass distribution for movies, just as video cassettes or DVDs have done previously.

"We are working with another company to deliver movies on SD cards. You can start watching unbelievable quality movies," Zander enthused.

Source: Reuters