Motorola unveils five new low-end phones

Motorola Inc, the world's second-largest cellphone maker, on Tuesday launched five new low-end handsets priced at less than US $100 in order to expand in developing markets such as India, China, and Africa.
Demand for entry-level phones has been booming in heavily populated markets such as India, the world's fastest-growing mobile market, and China, the world's largest market by subscribers.
Motorola's expansion in low-end markets is critical for the company to boost its market share and close the gap with industry leader, Finland's Nokia Oyj. Nokia sells twice as many phones as its US rival and makes one out of every three mobiles sold globally, analysts said.
"There's a population of about three billion in the high-growth markets of Africa, Middle East, Southeast and Southwest Asia, with relatively low mobile penetration rates," Allen Burnes, Motorola's Corporate Vice President for High-Growth Markets, told Reuters in an interview.
Motorola unveiled two clamshell, entry-level colour phones - the W220 and W375 - which will be available in retail outlets in the July-September and October-December quarters respectively.
Both models offer text and picture messaging, have built-in radios and alarm clocks, but the W375 comes with a tiny digital camera as well. The slender, candy bar-shaped W208 - about 1.5 cm thick - also offers a colour display, speakerphone and a "lantern" or torchlight function. It will hit store shelves in the fourth quarter.
The CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) models - the monochrome W170 and colour-screen W210 - are also candy bar-shaped, and will start shipping in the third and fourth quarters respectively. Both phones measure only 1.46 cm thick, reminiscent of Motorola's clamshell RAZR, which is about half an inch, or 1.4 cm, thick.
Burnes added that Motorola's new handsets would cater to first-time cellphone users as well as low-income users who were looking to upgrade. The global mobile industry has reached over two billion subscribers last year, research data showed.
In the January-March quarter, Nokia had a global market share of 32.8 percent, versus 20.1 percent for second-ranked Motorola, according to data from research outfit Strategy Analytics.