NEW YORK: Motorola Mobility and Nokia held events on Wednesday in New York to unveil their latest smartphones.

Both firms hope to make a foothold in the smartphone market dominated by giants Apple and Samsung which account for about 50 percent of the global smartphone market.

Other phone-makers are so far behind that there is essentially no relevant third player.

At its event, Motorola unveiled three smartphones under its Razr brand that will be sold to Verizon customers. It said the focus of the phones was speed, because they connected to Verizon's faster fourth-generation network. And they have larger screens than their primary rival, the iPhone.

The new phones - the Droid Razr HD, Droid Razr M and Droid Razr Maxx HD - have a crucial component that reflects Motorola's legacy as a radio company: the Motorola-made cellular modems inside them, which connect with newer, faster fourth-generation LTE networks.

Nokia launched two smartphones — the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 820, both of which will run on Windows 8 OS.

Nokia Lumia 920  is Nokia’s flagship device which has a curved 4.5-inch PureMotion HD+ screen, a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 CPU with 1 GB RAM, 32 GB disk space and 7 GB storage in the cloud with SkyDrive for users.

Nokia also promises a bigger 2,000mAh battery which is expected to last 10 hours with 3G. The Lumia 920 has NFC, integrated wireless charging and an 8.7 megapixel rear PureView camera with HD video.

The phone also has “Super Sensitive Touch,” which will let users handle their smartphone even while wearing gloves.

Nokia Lumia 820 is the less pricier version and has polycarbonate unibody with a 4.3 inch screen. It is also NFC enabled with an 8 megapixel PureView branded camera. This smartphone will also support wireless charging.

The 1GB RAM and dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor will ensure that there is little lag. It has 8GB space (expandable upto 32 GB) and 7 GB in SkyDrive.