Motorola chief executive Ed Zander was upbeat as he announced a slew of partnerships in his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The biggest deal was with Yahoo!, the search engine, to provide content to phones via a new service called Y!Go.
This, said Zander and Marco Boerries, vice-president of connected life at Yahoo!, was the opposite of "trying to squish the internet on to a small device".
The service is designed to deliver location-aware content to the user via local searches, weather and guides.
Zander and Boerries showed off checking the weather in Las Vegas and searching for reviews of bars, restaurants and shows, as well as checking share portfolios and drilling down through the available content to further information such as related news stories and subscription news services.
However, tech companies know that social networking drives use of hardware and technology, so Zander and Boerries also demonstrated how users can upload pictures snapped on their mobiles to Yahoo!'s Flickr sharing website directly from their phones.
Most of this functionality is already available on mobiles, though as a user experience it is generally clunky, slow and frustrating - and as a result, mobile owners tend not to use it.
An improved and streamlined interface would certainly encourage more people to make such use of their mobiles but the crucial deciding factor is price, which will be determined by the mobile networks.
What people do use their mobiles for, however, is for music, and Zander had some big numbers to illustrate the potential for both content providers - that is, the music stores - and the manufacturers of the hardware.
By the end of this year, he said, there will be 500m music-enabled devices and one is sold every five seconds somewhere in the world.
That's a lot of opportunity for artists, record companies and manufacturers of mobile devices.
With a buzzword at this year's CES turning out to be "convergence", Zander wheeled on Chris White, senior director of multimedia experiences at Motorola, to show off how new phones such as the music-oriented ROKR E6, launched in China at the end of last year, can connect to online music stores via Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
This phone finally abandons Apple's iTunes, plumping instead for an operating system based on the open-source Linux kernel and using Java to deliver the user interface.
All this adds fuel to the fire of rumours that Steve Jobs will announce Apple's own "iPhone" at Macworld in San Francisco today.
Zander also announced a partnership with Warner Music Group which means that the mobile user will be able to access a package of material via the phone-based online service including ringtones and videos. More broadly, the phone will work with Windows Media Player software that allows users to create playlists from various online music stores to sync to their phones.
While the strategy outlined at CES is clearly to encourage rich first-world users of mobiles to maximise the potential of their devices by downloading the myriad of data and content available, Zander also has a keen eye on the developing world, which analysts point to as a continuing source of growth.
China, said Zander, has 5 million new mobile subscribers a month, and 1bn SMS messages are sent there every day, while monthly growth in India is around 6 million new subscribers.
Zander showed off the Motofone, designed for use in tropical environments with its dust-proof casing and simple, icon-led user interface.
But perhaps he took a risk appearing on stage on a bike to demonstrate the mechanical charger attached to its handlebars which draws energy from a dynamo on the wheel.
"There are 500 million cyclists in China," he proclaimed. Jokes about the wheels falling off the share price would presumably be very unwelcome, particularly as its shares tumbled on Wall Street last week after it warned quarterly results would be lower than both than its own and analysts' forecasts.
