During an earnings conference call with industry analysts, Motorola’s co-CEO says that two new Motorola Android based handsets, on track to be released in time for the holidays, will contribute positively to the company’s bottomline. He adds that deals are already in place with two major carriers for them to carry these Moto Android handsets. He further says that these handsets “will get us back in the game in smartphones“. Personally, I’m not too sure that this will help turn things around at Moto’s handset division which has been steadily losing money and market share for some time now. From its heyday, Moto only commands a 5.5% global market share, and I believe it lags behind Nokia, Samsung and LG worldwide. I’ve always felt that a company selling handsets should have its own operating system to reduce/eliminate dependence on other companies – after all, if it’s a key component of its livelihood, one has to take all measures necessary to ensure the success of one’s products are in one’s own hands! Moto has flirted with Windows Mobile devices in the past and still uses it, and clearly this hasn’t brought about the benefits that it had hoped.
Apart from the US, where it still commands a bit of customer goodwill (being an American brand and all that patriotic stuff), I don’t think the Moto brand is as strong as it once was. And in the Android handset space, with the things that HTC is doing with its HTC Sense UI stuff and entry level Android handsets, I am not sure if two Android handsets is sufficient to stem the bleeding from Moto’s handset coffers, currently running at more than US$ 250 million per quarter. To summarise, I don’t think the new handsets will matter much in the grand scheme of things, and I expect Moto to fade slowly into oblivion in the next half decade.
Moto has gone WinMo and even Linux and Symbian (UIQ) before! If you din have your own OS, at least better have some sweet overlay and customisations on top like what HTC and Samsung has done with their WinMo phones.
Moto phones have no software differentiator when it comes to the competition. Hardware-wise, some moto phones are actually not too bad but when it comes to the internal OS, now thats a different story. A majority of people don’t really like MOto OSes and Moto has not really done much of a damn thing to improve it…
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Da Alpha Dog Reply:
August 2nd, 2009 at 1:04 am
@Jack, as usual, you’ve elaborated nicely on why I say that Moto is going to be an insignificant player in the mobile market soon…
You know, I can still remember when it was so cool to own one of those Moto Startac clamshells. They were pricey (almost RM 3,000 for a dumb-phone back in the day) and the hinge area cracked after repeated opens and closes…ah, those were the good ole’ Moto heydays…
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Yeah, and battery life was like shite and you either had to put in those thicker version batteries or carry a spare battery!
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