Mobile phone heavyweights Motorola, have reported bumper earnings for the third quarter, with profits more than tripling after record sales.
Purring contentedly over a ‘none more black’ balance sheet, Motorola announced that the results for the three months until the end of September revealed a net profit of $1.75bn (~£1bn, ~€1.46bn), compared to $479m from the same period last year.
Handsets were up 41% year-on-year with quarterly sales soaring 26% to a new high of $9.42bn, from $7.5bn for the same period in 2004.
The world’s second largest maker of mobile phones also managed to grab a bigger share of the global mobile phone market, barging their way to a fat 19% slice – up 5.5% over the year, and up 1% since the second quarter of 2005.
Since Ed Zander took over as the company’s CEO in 2004 Motorola have been on a roll, with sales and profits heading in a stratospheric direction.
“We are very excited about our third quarter results and overall performance year-to-date… Excluding re-organisation charges, all four of Motorola’s businesses grew profitably during the quarter,” said a deeply chuffed Zander.
During the last quarter, Motorola managed to ship 38.7 million mobile phones, including 6.5 million of its fashionable slimline Razr units and a quarter of a million iTunes music phones.
The US company is now forecasting pocket-bulging fourth-quarter sales of $10.3bn.
Two thieving Bulgarian border officials were caught red-handed after their attempt to steal a high tech phone from US ambassador John Beyrle was foiled, thanks to the handset’s built in GPS tracking device reports The Inquirer.
The purloining picaresque pair looked like they’d got away with pocketing the phone until Beyrle flipped open his laptop, activated the phone’s GPS (Global Positioning System) and waited to see where it would appear onscreen.
Faced with such large scale larceny, regular travellers to the country may be wise to consider fitting GPS tags to all of their belongings.
Quickly earning a We Want One Now Please accolade, Garmin have announced the nüvi, a feature packed GPS travel assistant the size of a deck of playing cards.
Garmin are claiming that the built-in lithium ion battery offers between 4-8 hours of battery life.
With the guide, travellers can look up and translate more than 17,000 words or 20,000 phrases per language with a text-to-speech interface letting users talka da lingo.
Sold exclusively in Europe, the nüvi 300 comes with approximately 200 MBs of internal memory for storage of supplemental maps, MP3s, and audio books (available from Audible.com). Pricing to be announced.
The super-thin triband LG U880 will be offered in black, silver and pink with its clamshell design incorporating a 1.3 megapixel camera and expandable internal memory of 80 MB.
The first mass-market 3G Nokia handset to go on sale in the UK, the 6280 has a sliding keyboard and built-in 2 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom and integrated flash.
A poseur’s delight, the Motorola RAZR V3x is the high-fashion phone for the “Look at me!” crowd, with its slinky, slim-line form supporting a full range of 3G services.
Destined to be 3’s first two megapixel phone when it becomes available at the end of October, the Nokia N70 is based on the hugely successful Nokia 6680 and offers video calling, integrated flash, a built-in FM tuner, Bluetooth and support for Visual Radio.
There still seems to be plenty of cash slopping around the broadband sector, as PIPEX has just waved its weighty wad in the direction of Freedom to Surf (F2S) and bought the company for £10m.
It’s uncertain whether existing Freedom2Surf customers already using LLU via the EasyNet LLUStream range will stay where they are or be shunted on to a PIPEX LLU product.
Peter Dubens, Chairman of PIPEX, said: “In the light of our recent decision to unbundle an initial 60 exchanges, we are very pleased to add F2S to the PIPEX group, which will further increase the density of customers around each exchange, thus improving the return on capital and enabling us to offer higher speeds to a greater number of our customers. F2S’s customers will be able to benefit from our extensive network and the broad range of services we provide.”
Panasonic has announced a new range of attractive music players with battery lives that make the Duracell bunny look like a fag-smoking sloth in lead boots.
The SD350V/ SD300V models come with a smaller display (5 lines), less fancy navigation buttons and a battery claiming up to 94 hours of SD audio playback.
The site also bangs on about Panasonic’s “Double drive in side phone” which, apparently, has separate drivers for bass and treble raising, the, err, “shelter density”.
The SV-SD750V/700 measures up at 87.3x46x11mm and 48.4g, while the SV-SD350V/300 is marginally smaller at 87×40.5×10.3mm and 47.9g.
Samsung Electronics have launched the hard-disk-based SPH-V7900 mobile phone, sporting a record-breaking built-in 3GB hard disk drive.
Naturally, there’s an MP3/video player onboard, capable of playing several formats including Mpeg4/H.264 video and Mpeg4 AAC, AAC+ and MP3 audio.
Their SGH-I300 – scheduled for a European November release – will run on the Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system and also offer a 3GB hard disk drive offering plug-and-play support (so files can be dragged over from your home PC).
According to the latest figures from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Italy can now boast the highest mobile penetration rate in Europe, with mobile-mad Italians notching up 109.42 phones per 100 inhabitants.
With over four million UMTS users, Italians are also leading the way in 3G take up, with the ITU reporting that the country is the most prominent user of 3G services in Europe.
Mind you, it could be argued that Luxembourg’s high mobile ownership is equally skewed due to their nationals living in neighbouring countries needing a second handset for use within its borders.
Sony Ericsson has today announced the launch of their first 3G (UMTS) tri-band GPRS Walkman phone, the W900.
The phone comes stuffed with multimedia widgets, with a built-in FM radio and 2 megapixel auto-focus flash camera offering 8x digital zoom and the ability to record and playback video at a nippy 30fps.
In line with its Walkman branding, the phone has dedicated music controls, letting users scroll through play lists, artists or individual songs, and a bundled LCD remote control.
The W900 UMTS Walkman phone will be commercially available in black or white finished by the end of Q4 2005 in two versions:
Call us cynical if you like, but when we get a press announcement trumpeting some kind of ‘world first’ or another from someone we’ve never heard of, our eyebrows tend to arc skywards.
It is significant that content is breaking on mobiles before it’s in the shops and we’ve no doubt that mobiles will continue to play a greater part in the distribution of music and video, but we can’t really get excited about someone (even if they have got dazzling teeth) releasing a few snippets of a DVD for mobiles and then expecting the Guinness Book of Records to be calling them up.
In fact, we’re so unimpressed that we can’t even be bothered to give you the name of the video, but you can find it somewhere on Vodafone’s Dutch Live TV website, or just click around chirpy Frans’ website.