Motorola Chairman and CEO Ed Zander says his company is ready for competition from Apple"s iPhone, due out next month. When asked "How do you deal with that?" by M.R. Rangaswami of Sand Hill Group at the Software 2007 conference Wednesday in Santa Clara, California, Zander quickly retorted, "How do they deal with us?" Zander believes the iPhone will stimulate the overall market for feature-rich mobile devices, including Motorola"s. "I think it"s going to, in some cases, reinforce what we have been trying to do and are doing with the mobile Internet. Applications like multimedia and video and photos and music are going to be done on these devices."
Motorola is planning to introduce a high-end mobile phone next week in Europe that Zander touted as having "unbelievable video capability. It"s a media monster." He refused to unveil more, other than that it will be able to play movies stored on an SD card.
Zander also mentioned that 32% of Motorola"s sales are from the enterprise market and said first quarter acquisitions of Good Technology and Symbol Technologies were key to its enterprise strategy. He also displayed the Motorola MC 35 Enterprise Digital Assistant, based on Symbol enterprise mobility technology, and a Motorola Q model featuring Good"s e-mail software, both targeted at mobile workers. Zander also noted industry figures forecast that by 2009, 70% of workers will need wireless connectivity to do their jobs and emphasized that the future of computing is on mobile, connected devices rather than on traditional desktop PCs.