Faced with Apple Inc.’s widely expected June iPhone launch and likely market share losses to other rivals already this year, Motorola Chief Executive Ed Zander told analysts on a conference call on Wednesday they planned to fight back with a new product strategy in a details-light discussion peppered with some choice barbs for rivals.

Motorola designers are now focused on bringing the Internet and “rich experiences” to mobile phones, he said, highlighting features such as music and video.

On Apple:
Zander bemoaned how the company failed to take advantage of its early access to Apple’s iTunes music software, which were offered on its highly anticipated but unpopular Rokr phone in 2005. ”We were the first ones to have iTunes a couple of years ago, and I think the team just did not pick up on that …. That is where I think the action is,” he said.

Zander also hinted that the iPhone’s touch-screen user interface may also influence Motorola’s future product strategy. Users control touch-screen phones by tapping a touch sensitive screen instead of keypads buttons. Motorola has successfully sold its touch sensitive Ming phone in China for about a year and a half, but has not yet sold it in the United States.

“I don’t know what the big deal is with touchscreen,” said Zander. “We have tried touch-screens here in the US before. They have not worked. Maybe they will work now.”

On design:
Slim good looks once made Motorola’s Razr phone famous and put the company on a fast track to growth. But Zander suggested that this was another era, as the company would now focus less on dreaming new phone shapes or form factors than on new features and “utility.”

“The brouhaha about the product that’s going to be introduced in the west coast … is not so much about the form factor it’s what it does,” he said in another thinly veiled reference to Apple.

On rival Samsung:
Without naming names he dismissed as “very hard to use” a rival phone with traditional keypad on one side and buttons dedicated to a music player on the opposite side. Samsung Electronics recently unveiled a phone that fits this description.

“We have got to be careful as the company that invented cool and the company that invented design language, we don’t start building things that foldout like Swiss Army knives and turn upside-down and do whatever,” Zander said.