3GSM Barcelona 2006 live coverage

GSMArena team, 12-16 February 2006.

Although Motorola had a very strong presence on 3GSM Congress 2006 Barcelona, they haven't presented many exciting new devices. It's seems that they are concerned about the widespread RAZR wannabe products and will start to announce their new products closer to their shipment dates.

On a press conference held on the first day of the congress Motorola outlined its vision for the future. They are aiming high; their main slogan was "Connecting the next billion".

Motorola showed some statistics for 2005; according to the slides, Motorola has the highest shipment growth and the best selling product in Europe (RAZR V3 with 5.1% share in the market). In the handset business they are positioned in first place on the North American and Latin American market and in second in Europe and North Asia.

Some Motorola 2005 statistics

It seems that the 4-letter naming of the most interesting Motorola products won't stop this year. DSGN is a 4-letter word for Motorola and it's quite interesting for us why Q and Z models only got one letter.

DSGN

One of the news from the conference is that Motorola Q and Z models will have versions for the European market. Q will be shipped as EV-DO device for North America first, while Z will start as CDMA phone for Korea.

Motorola also announced the cheap W220 RDIO phone with RAZR-like design for the developing countries. The device doesn't have an external display, but has 3 LEDs instead. Not a bad idea to keep the price low.

Another news was that the Asian A1200 model will be called MING (transparent) for the European market. The MING was just approved for tri-band support and is expected to hit the European and U.S. markets soon.

The handsets

The Scalpel model, or as it's now called SCPL, was not introduced as expected. Anyway Motorola seems to have some huge plans for it looking at the Nokia caricature they presented.

Samsung has a PEBL ad too; Nokia afraid of the SCPL?