14 DAY TRIAL // Motorola and Kodak announced more than a year ago a cross licensing and marketing alliance created in the attempt to boost the image capture experience of camera cell phones. This announcement was well received by everyone and great expectations followed.
To show the customers that they really want to make camera phones better, the two companies revealed the approaching release of a new product. More exactly, Antonio Perez - the President of Kodak - announced in Boston, at the JPMorgan Technology Conference, that a Motorola cell phone with a 5 mega pixel CMOS Kodak sensor will be launched soon. Mr. Perez said: "Our CMOS sensors have been well advancing for many years. And now we will have the ability to embed the sensor in the phone with all the richness we have with our imaging software. It will allow us to make the sensor, the most important part of the camera, able to manage the light, color, and the like."
The declaration about the Motorola-Kodak phone was followed by another, regarding the fact that Kodak intends to quit the low-end digital camera business as it's not really a profitable one. "We're going to be abandoning the low-end of the digital camera business. As everyone knows, we're not making much money there. Now we have our own CMOS sensors, so you might see us going down in price because we can make money," stated Mr. Perez.
Not much is known about the new 5 megapixel camera phone, but Motorola and Kodak plan to release it just in time for this year's holiday season.
A similar alliance with the Motorola-Kodak one is the one between Nokia and Carl Zeiss. Nokia already launched a 5 megapixel camera phone with Carl Zeiss optics, the N95, so it will be interesting to see how the just-announced Motorola device is received by the mobile phone market.