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Reuters news:
CHICAGO, Sept 18 (Reuters) - Motorola Inc. , the world's second-largest mobile phone maker, on Wednesday said a preliminary plan for the phones it expects to launch in 2003 leaked onto the Internet earlier this week.
According to the plan, posted by a member of online mobile phone discussion Web site Howard Forums, Motorola is planning to introduce phones with more multimedia features such as high-resolution color screens, musical ring tones, two-way video conferencing and photo downloading capabilities.
The phones are expected to be released throughout 2003, the posting said.
Alan Buddendeck, a spokesman for Motorola, told Reuters that someone had gotten hold of a plan, which included images of the phones, but he stressed that it was an old version.
"It was frankly dated material," Buddendeck said. "We're always innovating and taking another look at a product plan before any given year so of course the portfolio goes through many development cycles as we prepare to go to market.
"Motorola security is looking into the point of origin on that (leak), but right now we're still investigating how and where it would've happened," he added.
Buddendeck declined to comment on specific phone models for next year, citing competitive reasons.
Motorola, which has been criticized in the past for missing key cell phone trends, has been aggressive in developing and marketing new phones amid increasing competition and a slowdown in cell phone demand.
Motorola, which invented the cell phone in the 1970s, was dominant in the industry for a long time, but lost its market share to the more aggressive and innovative Nokia in the late 1990s.
Motorola at the end of the second quarter had 15.7 percent market share compared with Nokia's 35.6 percent, according to market research group Gartner Dataquest.
The images for the new phones posted on the Web site show that Motorola plans to update some of its current phones including the V60, a small, silver lightweight clamshell-type phone; V70, a phone with a rotating cover; and the C330, its entry-level phone.
Motorola will also introduce other designs, according to the plan. All of the phones in the plan were based on Global System for Mobil Communications, the dominant wireless technology standard in the world.
"We hesitate to draw conclusions from these images," Tim Luke, wireless equipment analyst with Lehman Brothers, said in a research note, "The listed models may not accurately reflect the current plans of Motorola's (phone) unit and likely do not reflect the complete portfolio of Motorola GSM products due in 2003."
Shares of Motorola were up 27 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $10.95 on the New York Stock Exchange in Wednesday afternoon trading.
((--Yukari Iwatani, Chicago Equities News at 312 408 8787,
chicago.equities.newsroom@reuters.com))
Wednesday, 18 September 2002 18:47:24
ENDS [nN1874812]
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Posted: 2002-09-19 11:12:00
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