Will New Phones Save Motorola?

At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company rolled out its first set of products since former chief executive Ed Zander resigned late last year.

During Zander's reign the Schaumburg company released the wildly successful Razr mobile phone, but subsequent releases have proven to be disappointing.

The company's share of the global market for mobile devices collapsed from 23 percent at the end of 2006 to 13 percent within six months and have yet to recover.

Having slipped from No.2 to No.3 in the mobile market - behind Nokia and Samsung - Motorola hopes to breathe life back into its phone division with its new Z10.

The company called its new Moto Z10 handset a "mobile film studio" which lets users record high-quality video, edit it, and upload it to various social-networking sites and other places.

It also revived its Rokr line of music phones with the new Rokr E8.

The original Rokr featured Apple's iTunes but sales never reached critical mass as users complained of a slow interface, slow music transfers, and limited capacity.

The E8 hopes to improve in all these areas, utilizing Windows Media, and a new touch-screen interface that displays a typical numeric keypad when used as a phone, but media centric controls when playing media.

"With our unique ModeShift technology, we're dispelling the myth that mobile phones with music features are inferior to standalone audio devices," said Stu Reed, president of Motorola's mobile devices