Motorola will introduce a handheld organizer on Monday that meshes with its cellular phone technology -- making it possible to dial a phone number stored in an organizer with one touch.
Called the StarTac Mobile Organizer, it is the first product to result from Motorola's acquisition in July of Starfish Software.
The suggested retail price of the organizer, an accessory that clips onto the back of a Motorola StarTac cellphone, is $250. It will be available in the second quarter through cellular phone carriers and electronics retail outlets. Motorola has not yet priced the combination StarTac phone/organizer package.
"The carriers may choose to subsidize the product because it will be easier to make extra calls," said Ravi Srivastava, a director of strategy and marketing in Motorola's cellular subscriber business. "It gives you the ability to have a turbo dialing approach."
The StarTac Mobile Organizer is a bit larger than a pager, weighs 2.3 ounces and runs for about nine months on two lithium batteries. It clips easily onto most versions of the popular StarTac cellular phone, which is one of the smallest and lightest cell phones, with millions in use.
A user can click through the organizer calendar and address book functions using pager-like keys while on the go, without having to look up an entire phone number, and then dial it.
"It's probably going to be one of my Top 10 products of the year," said Andrew Seybold, editor of a newsletter on mobile computing. "It's also going to change the definition of a smart phone dramatically."
Seybold estimated that Motorola could sell 500,000 organizers to the installed base of 10 million StarTac users and that up to 500,000 new subscribers could buy StarTac phones because of the organizer in its first year.
Starfish is mostly known for creating the calendaring and scheduling software that is part of the REX, a tiny handheld computer the size of a credit card. Starfish was founded in 1994 by the software industry maverick Philippe Kahn, who also founded Borland International Inc.
The company, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola, also develops software called TrueSynch, which lets a user enter information once on one device and download it or transfer it to other devices such as a personal computer or a PalmPilot, synchronizing all updates at once.
The Motorola StarTac Organizer has TrueSynch technology to synchronize with PC organizer software, such as Microsoft Outlook and IBM's Lotus Organizer, Web-based calendars such as Yahoo Calendar & Address Book, and personal digital assistants, such as 3Com's Palm Pilot.
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