Motorola plans movie-playing mobile phone

Ed Zander, chairman and CEO of Motorola, gives a keynote speech at the 2007 International CES in Las Vegas, Nevada January 8, 2007. 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, Zander said on Wednesday.

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.

On Monday, Zander told Motorola's annual shareholder meeting in Chicago that the company planned to showcase a variety of new mobile devices based on 3G and Java technologies. Java allows software developers to write applications once and have them run on hundreds of different mobile phones that use Java as an underlying software layer.

Motorola has blamed a lack of 3G devices for its recent weak sales.

A new forecast published on Wednesday by telecommunications market research group Infonetics predicts that 46 million mobile phone users will own mobile video phones by 2010. It said network carrier revenue in the emerging market for video services grew 317 percent in 2006 to almost $200 million.

The Asia Pacific region is the stronghold of mobile video subscribers, where markets like Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong held 57 percent of the world total in 2006.

Europe, Middle East and Africa had 31 percent of the subscribers, while North America had 10 percent and Central America/Latin America just 3 percent, according to estimates by Infonetics, a Campbell, California-based research firm.

(Additional reporting by Sinead Carew in New York)