Motorola will next week take the wraps off a phone capable of showing "full-motion" Hollywood movies, the company's chief said yesterday, though he went some way from promising a true personal media player experience.

Speaking in the US, Motorola CEO Ed Zander said next week's launch would include a Euro-centric 3G handset capable of playing video at 30fps. It will also feature a technology that can squeeze a full-length film onto a 2GB SD card.

The phone will be a "media monster", Zander said.

Of course, nothing he said isn't possible already. If you can compress a typical standard definition movie into the 4.7GB provided by a single-layer DVD, you can squeeze a lower resolution version onto a 2GB SD card. Equipping a handset with a decent LCD isn't exactly a breakthrough either.

Still, Zander's hyperbole points to a new push into mobile media, just as Nokia has been doing for some time and is stressing more and more with its N series of handsets. And as Apple has shown, consumers are willing to watch video on the (very) small screen.

Zander's comments come in a quarter O2 is expected to announce the now-confirmed XDA Flame, a Windows Mobile-based handset with a large, 480 x 640 display, Nvidia graphics chip, SRS Wow 3D sound, 2GB of Flash storage and a TV-out port. The Flame is likely to be pitched as a personal media player.