Motorola shows two handsets designed for Orange
AMSTERDAM, June 24 (Reuters) - French wireless carrier Orange on Tuesday showed two new handsets from U.S. mobile phone maker Motorola with an Orange-specific design and it said more were expected in coming years.
Motorola, the world's second-largest mobile phone maker behind much larger Nokia of Finland, said it hoped to duplicate its success in the Americas where it has worked closely with operators to design handsets.
It has grown its market share there in recent years.
"I think this model (of cooperation with telecoms operators) is certainly transferable to Europe," said Ron Garriques, general manager of Motorola's European mobile phone unit.
European operators are traditionally not as involved in handset designs, unlike the Americas and Japan, where handset makers often produce phones according to specifications from carriers.
Orange and its larger British-based rival Vodafone Group Plc have broken with that culture late last year when they introduced picture camera phones with their logos stamped on them and their own special software inside.
"In the end we realise that service providers like Orange own the customers. That is very different from some vendors which think they own the customer," Garriques said in a thinly veiled reference to Nokia.
Nokia has invested heavily in its own marketing and brand image and has been reluctant to give carrier brands a prominent place on its handsets.
Motorola is the first big handset maker to produce what Orange has dubbed "Orange-signature" phones, after earlier deals with Palm-based devices from Handspring and Microsoft phones made by Taiwan's High Tech Computer.
Motorola showed the new V500 and a version of the V600.
Garriques said the phones could be tailored to Orange by wrapping different casings around a standard module, adding that by next year it could design phones from the ground up with Orange.
Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service
:flop: Dann werden die Teile hier bestimmt auch gebrandet werden, ala T610...
Ich empfinde das als Verseuchung... Naja egal, Orange gibts in DE ja eh nicht aber die Kunden von denen tuen mir leid da sie jetzt auch diesen Mist in Massen aufgedrückt bekommen.