Motorola Planning Movie-Capable Phone

Motorola CEO Ed Zander says his company is set to unveil on a mobile phone capable of playing full-motion feature films stored on SD memory cards.

Speaking at the Software 2007 conference in Silicon Valley, Motorola CEO Ed Zander revealed that his company plans to unveil a new mobile phone capable of playing back full-motion, full-length motion pictures stored on SD cards. Zander described the phone as a “media monster,” and said the company plans to show the product next week.

According to Zander’s remarks, the new phone will be capable of playing 30 frames-per-second, full-motion video on its internal display; movies will be stored on removable SD storage media, although Zander gave no details about video formats the phone might support. Motorola is working with another unnamed company to offer full-length movies on SD cards, which will apparently be offered for retail sale in a manner similar to traditional DVDs. Zander did not offer any details on which studios or movie distributors will be offering titles in SD format.

The new phone would apparently be initially available in Europe, where 3G phone high-speed data services are more widely available than in the U.S. market, although it’s not clear how that relates to playing back movies stored on an SD card, although 3G networks could certainly factor into offering downloadable, high-quality video content for phones.