While the stars of the show at Motorola Inc.’s product launch last week in New York were new digital versions of its popular StarTac phones and the new, super-small phone dubbed the V series, several other noteworthy devices made their debuts.
Among the more interesting is the FLEXsmart pager, model SP1300, which combines paging with a personal information manager, storing phone numbers, calendar and to-do lists. Data are displayed on a nine-line screen. The unit runs on Motorola’s FLEX operating system. It has an infrared port and comes with software that can be loaded into a desktop computer so that data can be transferred between the two.
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The smart pager can store 200 phone numbers, 200 to-do items and 200 calendar entries.
It weighs just over 4 1/2 ounces, measures roughly 3 1/2 inches by 2 3/4 inches and carries a suggested retail price of $249.
Another pager, the PF1500, is equipped with a confirmed message delivery feature, which allows a carrier to store messages when the pager is turned off or out of range, and forward them when the user is back in range. Suggested price tag is $219.
Also new is a two-way radio about the size of a deck of playing cards, which is positioned as a family stay-in-touch device for ski outings and other loose gatherings. It’s priced at $169.
On the higher end, the company showed off the i1000 phone, a fourth generation device based on Motorola’s iDEN technology, which permits digital cell phone, two-way radio and alphanumeric paging in a single device.
The five-ounce, 4 1/2-by-2-inch phone has a graphic display and a speakerphone and works with Nextel cellular network.
It ships at the end of the month, and Motorola said it won’t cost significantly more than the current generation, which carries a price tag of $229.
It’s a small world: You were right if you thought Summer Internet World, which wound up a weeklong run July 17 at McCormick Place, was smaller in floor size than it was last year.
The show drew about 200 exhibitors this year, compared to “a little over 200 last year,” according to show conference chairman Jack Powers.
On the up side, the show’s conferences enrolled about 2,000 people, compared to about 1,800 last year, with sessions on XML– extensible markup language for the Web–particularly popular.
Powers said show visitors seem more interested in finding tailored solutions to specific problems in using the Internet as a business tool than in being wowed by the latest technology.
No word yet on attendance.
Banking on a win: Microsoft Corp. general counsel Brad Smith said the Microsoft legal department has had no conversations with company engineers about preparing for the possibility of an adverse decision in the antitrust case brought by the U.S. Justice Department.
“We haven’t had any discussions like that,” Smith said during a recent visit with the Tribune editorial board.
A loss in court could mean altering the configuration of the Windows operating system, potentially a complex and costly undertaking that could conceivably affect the availability of the OS as well as the company’s stock price.
But Smith said Microsoft lawyers and engineers aren’t talking about that because they can’t predict what a court might require.
He noted that Microsoft thought it understood a judge’s order to unbundle Windows 95 last year when it presented two versions of the operating system–one outdated and the other virtually useless. “Our engineers thought they knew what (he) meant,” Smith said.
After being criticized in the media and by their Justice Department courtroom adversaries for flouting the order, Microsoft produced a workable unbundled version of the operating system.
Now, Smith said, Microsoft won’t try to anticipate the impact of a courtroom loss on the design of its products.
“There are so many different hypothetical possibilities,” he said. “Right now we don’t have any specifics at hand.”
Iridium deadline: Motorola also shown off a non-working version of its $3,000 phone for the Iridium satellite calling project. But the margin of error for an on-time activation of the service is getting thin. Only 65 of 66 satellites needed for a complete network are working. Motorola has launched 72 satellites, including six as backups, but seven birds have failed.
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The company plans to deploy seven more satellites–five on a launch from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, and two others on a rocket in China–over the next six to eight weeks.
Motorola also has experienced problems with satellite software, which has pushed back production of the phone. Figures put forth by officials at Iridium–which is a separate company partly owned by Motorola–indicated a possible phone shortage before the end of the year.
Iridium is to begin partial service on Sept. 23 and “we are still committed to that date,” said Motorola spokeswoman Karen Culver. In addition to having part ownership of the project, Motorola is its principal contractor.