Plastic Logic has raised a record (for European startups) 100 million USD in a single funding round. At the same time they also announced that they have selected Dresden as the location for their manufacturing plant. Another attractive win for Silicon Saxony, as the former DDR headquarters of chipset design (and of the spying activities of the Communist government at that time) is known.

Plastic Logic's flexible display technology addresses the - potentially at least - big market for a paperless digital world. They promise to provide displays as flexible to handle and read as paper. While there are certainly professional applications (e.g. maintenance engineers) that would profit instantly and buy such products, to make flexible displays a mainstream product will take quite some time. I reckon that they had better keep the run rate very low to make the most of the current cash so that they can also support many years of product introduction to be expected. Still, it is a highly promising venture that deserves good attention!

With Motorola's annoucement of slow sales in Q3 - and now also in Q4 - some analysts are starting to wonder if this is a sign for the entire mobile handset industry that slower growth times are ahead.

Now Motorola has had one killer model in the last few years, the RAZR, which instantly made clamshell phones a success. The RAZR was such a big success that Motorola became the number 2 cellphone vendor in the world and moved even closer to the number 1 NOKIA. NOKIA itself did not really have such a big single winner phone model but instead was trying in all phone categories (music, low cost, smartphones, multimedia, clamshells) to bring many, many models on the market. Lots of losers were among the designs, I am sure, but with the big model range they were able to maintain their number one lead and still grow their overall business overall. It was a product strategy of being present in all segments while also trying to move towards new multimedia devices, hoping that mobile TV would fuel that market. SonyEricsson has been primarily trying to position itself in music phones and some smartphones. The only vendor being really innovative in the last few months with really new innovative design formats was Samsung though. They have tried out new form factors with such phones as the small volume and - when opened - v-shaped SGH X-830 or the card phone SGH-P310. Both seem right now only available in Europe and Asia. Otherwise Samsung is trying to copy both the Motorola RAZR and also some of Nokia's Nseries multimedia phones with similiar designs.

Nokia is BTW also the only vendor that is doing very heavy product marketing activities online, such as for the Nseries and also pushes mobile TV. They have created partly very good content, which goes far beyond the usual TV clips with some fancy looking crowds in "cool" environments. Overall the Nseries multimedia phones (N92, 93) are too big and heavy for my taste and would really need a killer mobile application before they become a big success. The idea that everybody is becoming a blogger who wants to instantly upload pictures or videos taken on the road or at parties is not yet becoming a reality.

What all the above also shows though is that cell phone innovation which also enjoys mainstream acceptance seems to be coming to an end, at least for some time. The big leap forward as we have seen it in the last 2 years or so does not seem to be continuing. In such a tough environment Nokia and also Samsung seem to have the right strategy. SonyEricsson would be hit very hard if indeed Apple enters the music phone market as well this year. And Motorola could go through some tough times pretty soon, having relied and milked its RAZR success for too long without using the time to build something similarly successful. One thing remains certain in the mobile phone markets. It will stay a fast moving highly competitive market, too fast for Siemens, Alcatel and a few others. But maybe next week's CES show will prove me wrong in case the vendors surprise with truly new innovative designs. They had better do so if they also want to enjoy strong growth in 2007.