Motorola launches world's 'thinnest' smartphone

Motorola has launched what it called an 'impossibly thin' Droid RAZR phone with a stainless-steel core, a Gorilla Glass screen and a nanotechnology Splash-guard that protects even the electrical boards inside.

Motorola Mobility's Indian-American president Sanjay Jha declared the 7.1mm-thick mobile device the world's thinnest smartphone. Not only is it thinner than other 3G phones, it will run on Verizon Wireless's 4G LTE network in the US.

In other countries, the phone will be called the Motorola RAZR. The details on international carriers and network compatibility will come soon.

With a 4.3-inch screen with qHD resolution, it will have higher contrast and richer color than iPhone 4S, said Jha.

Not only will it have an incredibly high-res screen and a powerful 1.2GHz dual-core processor, but it will be the 'first device to download HD movies from Netflix'.

On the software front, it runs Android 2.3.5, aka Gingerbread. It will not launch with Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of the Android OS.

The Droid RAZR supports the webtop interface, like the Droid Bionic, Atrix, Photon and others, so one can dock it to one of Motorola's lapdocks, in order to run full Firefox browser.

The RAZR also has MotoCast, a syncing system that Jha called the phone's most important feature.

'You can stream content from your computer straight to your pocket (or purse) so your personal content is always within reach,' according to a Motorola press release.

Millions of BlackBerry users cut off for third day

Millions of BlackBerry users around the world were left without text communication services for a third day on Wednesday as Research in Motion struggled to fix what it said was a switching failure in its private network.

Users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India suffered patchy email service and no access to browsing and messaging, ratcheting up negative sentiment towards a company already losing market share to Apple and Samsung.

RIM, which had said on Tuesday that services had returned to normal, said later the problems had actually spread beyond EMEA and India to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

"The messaging and browsing delays ... were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," it said. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service."

The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.

"It's a blow upon a bruise. It comes at a bad time," said Richard Windsor, global technology specialist at Nomura.

"One possibility could be that it encourages client companies to look more at other options such as allowing users to connect their own devices to the corporate server and save themselves the cost of buying everyone a BlackBerry."

Many companies, no longer seeing the need to pay to be locked into RIM's secure proprietary email service, have already begun allowing employees to use alternative smartphones, particularly Apple's iPhone, for corporate mail.

RIM has made inroads into the youth market attracted by its free BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service, partially compensating for its losses in the corporate market. But new products like its PlayBook tablet computer have been poorly received.

Following a dismal set of quarterly results and a plunge in its share price, some investors are now calling for a break-up, sale or change of management at the company.

Increasingly frustrated users tweeted their frustration on Wednesday, while RIM's own official Twitter feed was last updated on Tuesday night, saying problems were being resolved and it was sorry for the inconvenience.

Veteran British entrepreneur Alan Sugar, who founded electronics company Amstrad in 1968, tweeted: "In all my years in IT biz, I have never seen such an outage as experienced by Blackberry. I can't understand why it's taking so long to fix."

Some customers used humour to deal with the situation. One joke making the rounds on Twitter said: "What did the one BBM user say to the other? Nothing."

Apple's iPhone 4S breaks early order record

REUTERS - More than a million people placed early orders on Friday for Apple Inc's latest iPhone, the last product the company debuted before the death of its co-founder Steve Jobs.

Orders for the iPhone 4S, which will appear on store shelves this Friday, surpassed Apple's previous one-day record of 600,000 sales for the iPhone 4, pushing the company's shares up 5 percent to close at $388.81 on the Nasdaq stock market.

The new phone disappointed some fans when Apple introduced it last week, but it is proving to be a bigger draw because more telephone companies are carrying it and it will appear in more countries, analysts said.

Another big factor may be Jobs. Massive outpourings of grief and sympathy over his death last Wednesday at the age of 56, along with testaments to his genius and status as a visionary business leader in the media and by Apple products users online may have spurred sales,

"Many potential Apple customers, who have been on the fences before, will probably now want to (buy) it," said Steven Osinski, marketing professor at San Diego State University. "It's no different than when John Lennon was assassinated, sales of Beatles records shot up for a little while."

The initial skepticism from fans on the iPhone 4S was overridden by their desire to honor Jobs, said Barbara Sullivan, Managing Partner of Sullivan, a branding and marketing agency.

"The preorders may also be part of respect for what Jobs has done," she said. "It's almost like putting flowers by his headquarters."

Chief Executive Tim Cook said in a memo to staff on Monday that a celebration of Jobs' life will be held on Oct. 19.

The employee event will be held at an outdoor amphitheater at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, Cook said in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.

"Like many of you, I have experienced the saddest days of my lifetime and shed many tears during the past week," Cook said in the email memo. "And I've found comfort in both telling and listening to stories about Steve."

BIGGER ROLL-OUT

The iPhone 4S, which many Apple watchers saw as a minor follow-up to its previous model and featuring only incremental hardware upgrades, is going on sale in seven countries. The previous version was introduced in five.

Stores in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK will start selling the device on Friday. It will be available in 22 countries by the end of October, Apple said.

"It had everything people wanted. The market was disappointed, but the customers looked past the headline to see the content of the device itself," said Hudson Square analyst Daniel Ernst.

The 4S is on the Sprint Nextel Corp network, which is joining AT&T Inc and Verizon Wireless as an iPhone seller for the first time. In Japan, Apple added KDDI Corp as a distributor.

"Part of what's going to make this roll-out so much bigger is that the availability of the product is going to be much better," said Michael Yoshikami, CEO of YCMNET Advisors, which owns Apple shares. "You are going to see sales records set at a faster pace than people really would expect."

Analyst Colin Gillis said Apple still has a long way to go to meet Wall Street's sales expectations.

"It's not the first million. We know there's a large loyal base of users. They need to sell more than 20 million of these in this quarter to hit estimates," said Gillis. "Apple needs to break records to hit expectations."

Apple also must try to stem market share gains by phones running Google Inc's Android software. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which uses Android, is catching up with Apple in worldwide market share.

AT&T, which had exclusive U.S. rights to sell the iPhone for more than three years, took more than 200,000 orders for the 4S in the first 12 hours after it went on sale.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew in New York and Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; editing by Derek Caney, Lisa Von Ahn, Robert MacMillan and and Andre Grenon)