Motorola shows three new Mobile Music phones at Miami Music Multimedia - Motorola C650, Motorola E398 and Motorola E680

The Original Motorola A760

The first Linux phone announced in the world was Motorola A760 in February 2003. It was a palm pilot size device with 65k color display, HTML browser, WAP, JAVA and built-in camera (640 x 480 resolution). It was officially introduced in Taiwan in August, 2003. Seven months later, a new Linux phone was announced again by Motorola - the E680. The company is still the only major handset manufacturer to use Linux for its devices. Linux is open-source operating system created by a large group of programmers. In the handset market, it has to compete with operating systems that have already established themselves - Symbian, Palm and Microsoft Windows (for Smartphones and Pocket PC Phone Edition). Research by IDC shows that by 2006, Symbian will have 53% market share in high-end phones, 27% will be Microsoft powered, 10% Palm powered and only 4.2% might be Linux OS. I guess Motorola hopes to change the numbers and continues with Linux phone releases.

The Motorola E680 was announced March 08, 2004 during the Miami Music Multimedia (M3) Summit. The screen size is increased from 240 x 320 to 340 x 320 pixels. A distinctive difference is that the original A760 only supported 900 / 1800 frequencies, while the Motorola E680 supports 900/1800/1900 (global roaming capable) frequencies.

Motorola E680

The rest of Motorola E680 features are:

• Linux OS
• MMS
• Email
• Bluetooth
• VGA camera with MPEG4 video
• Java
• SD expansion card slot
• USB port
• MP3 and MIDI polyphonic ringtones
• RealPlayer
• MPEG4 video
• 3D graphics and sound engine 

The new Motorola E680 is expected to be released in the second half of 2004.