Motorola To Offer Movie-Playing Phone

Faced with relentless pressure from Carl Icahn, and desperate for a follow-up success to the RAZR, Motorola CEO Ed Zander addressed a crowd in Silicon Valley and promised that an upcoming handset would be a "media monster". FierceWireless has speculated that the handset in question may be the Z8, which we were shown at 3GSM earlier this year for EU release. Zander says the mystery phone, out next week, will be capable of playing video at a TV-grade 30fps. Most notably, though, the phone will play full-length movies and video content from SD memory cards. Motorola is working with content partners to seed the SD content ecosystem. I'm glad they are using an existing popular storage standard as opposed to proprietary systems, like Sony always uses to kill its own ecosystems. With SD, users could obviously also buy content online, and move it to the phone via SD, too. So I'll add that most importantly, this is another swipe against the expensive broadcast mobile video networks in that the cost of sneakernet to move the content to the mobile phone via SD is ~$0, while the cost of moving bits on unicast and broadcast networks is something higher. Ask the Long Distance companies how much fun it is to compete in a market where competitors have a $0 cost basis for your marquee product...