“Motorola Inc.’s recovery in 2004 has the company hungry for bigger sales and higher profits as it expands its range of products, its chief executive told Reuters Wednesday. The communications technology company, which increased sales by 35 percent last year and nearly doubled net profit, earlier this week announced a range of new mobile phones with four-letter names, such as the RAZR black, the SLVR and the PEBL,” Reuters reports.

“Another new model, the yet-to-be-unveiled ROKR, will be Motorola’s first phone that is fully compatible with Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes software, which will be Motorola’s default music player on handsets,” Reuters reports. “The phone will be Motorola’s way of tapping into the digital music market that has exploded over recent years. Handset competitors Nokia and Sony Ericsson earlier this week announced their own deals with online music services Sony Connect and Loudeye.”

“Unlike Apple, which allows Motorola users to carry a limited number of songs on their mobile phones in order to protect its popular iPod portable music player business, the rivals will allow consumers to carry as much music as they can store on their phone’s memory cards. There are already tiny memory cards on the market with capacity of one gigabyte that can store hundreds of songs,” Reuters reports. None of these initiatives are available to consumers yet, and meanwhile iTunes Music Store is the most popular music store on the Internet and its number of customers is growing. ‘We think we have time, plus we have the market leader (iTunes),’ Zander said. Apple was already discussing with mobile carriers how to let mobile phone users download tracks over the air when the newly announced rivals were just getting started.”

Full article here.

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