last100 » Motorola

Motorola just bet the house on Android and social networking

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:52:55 +0000

On stage live at GigaOm’s Mobilize 09 conference, Motorola just unveiled a large part of its comeback strategy (there seems to be a lot of “comebacks” in the handset market at the moment) based on a new smartphone powered by Android, the Google-led mobile OS, featuring a custom UI that puts social networking at its heart.

The phone, to be called the Motorola Cliq and offered exclusively on T-Mobile in the US, and the Motorola Dext in Europe, features 3G, WiFi, a 3.1 inch touch screen, slide-out landscape keyboard, and 5 megapixel camera, amongst its specs.

The big sell, however, is the new UI that Motorola has built on top of Android and an accompanying synchronization and backup service, both dubbed Motoblur. The combined offering “is the first and only solution to sync contacts, posts, messages, photos and much more—from sources such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Gmail, work and personal e-mail, and LastFM—and automatically deliver it to the home screen”. Or so the company claims.

If that all sounds similar to the custom Android work that HTC have recently done with the HTC Hero or Palm’s Synergy, or to a lesser extent, Nokia’s home screen widget approach on the N97 or much of the overall philosophy behind handset upstart INQ, it’s because it is. While Motorola are probably onto something with Motoblur, so is much of the rest of the industry.

The social web, as I’ve argued many times before, is the killer app for mobile data. And Motorola just bet the house on it.

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Blockbuster VOD service to land on Motorola handsets sometime in the future

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:54:46 +0000

This one feels a lot like a non-announcement, although technically it’s actually a pre-announcement.

Bricks ‘n’ mortar video rental chain Blockbuster is teaming up with Motorola in the U.S. to deliver its video-on-demand service to the handset maker’s future devices. Future being the operative word here as we don’t yet know when or on what phones, although it’s likely that the service will utilize Blockbuster’s recent partnership with Sonic Solutions, owners of the video download store CinemaNow, whose technology is already compatible with a range of mobile devices.

The fact that both Blockbuster and Motorola aren’t in the best of shape with regards to their respective markets won’t been lost on many, with Gizmodo’s Joanna Stern summing it up nicely: “I think it is romantic when two companies can hold each other in tough times.” Tough times indeed, although I’m skeptical that this partnership will do much for either companies’ bottom line.

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Google’s big bet: Android beyond the cellphone

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:29:50 +0000

Much of the iPod’s success, says Steve Jobs, is down to the fact that Japanese consumer electronics companies don’t produce elegant software. He makes the same accusation of handset makers too. They can do hardware but they “just can’t seem to get the software right.” Enter Android, Google’s open source OS, which although explicitly designed to deliver better software for Internet-connected cellphones, will also soon find its way onto all manner of devices.

“Over the last few weeks I have learned that numerous companies are tinkering with Android in an attempt to get the OS to power a whole slew of gadgets — everything from set-top boxes to navigation systems to mobile Internet devices to smart picture frames”, reports Om Malik.

Motorola have already confirmed that it has at least one Android-powered handset in the pipeline, but the company is also a major player in the television set-top box space and is said to be exploring the potential of Android in the living room too. Malik also says he’s heard from “fairly reliable sources” that two large PC makers are experimenting with Android-based Internet devices. None of which I find surprising. From both a technical and business point of view, Google has laid the foundations for Android to move quickly beyond its cellphone roots and, the company hopes, eventually become a ubiquitous platform.

Technology-wise, as Om notes, Android is “not just an operating system, but comes with middleware and key applications”, not least a robust mobile web browser – and a key factor in Google’s commitment to Android – along with the ability to handle 2D and 3D graphics, and various audio, video and image files. I’d also add into the mix location-based APIs and Google Maps, and an already growing library of third-party software and extensions, much of which will be open source in themselves.

While on the business side, the decision to make Android’s source code freely available to hardware makers at no cost isn’t enough in itself, Google’s choice of open source license makes it particularly attractive to consumer electronics companies who want to use Android to power new devices but in a way that will allow them to maintain control and differentiate their wares from competitors. Under the free-wheelin’ Apache license, device makers are free to make their own changes to the OS, such as altering the User Interface or adding new functionality, without submitting those changes back to the open source community, which would also include their competitors.

All of which, as Om says, makes it hard not to get excited about the potential of Android, despite being available today on only one handset and through one carrier. For every consumer electronics market, however small, that you’d like Apple to enter but which they likely won’t, we can probably expect multiple Android-powered offerings to try to fill the void.

On that note, however, a word of warning. Apple’s strength has always been its ability to control the whole user experience through the marriage of software and hardware. Or as User Interface pioneer Alan Kay once said, and Jobs likes to quote, “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Google’s making a different bet that, with their help at least, people who are serious about hardware no longer need to make their own software.

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Will Android be Motorola’s savior? Company confirms its interest in Google’s mobile OS

Daniel Langendorf — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:55:47 +0000

This comes as no shock, and it just might save Motorola’s cell phone hide.

According to BetaNews, Motorola has confirmed it is working on a new phone that utilizes Google’s mobile operating system Android. It’s no surprise because Motorola was a founding member of the Google-led Open Handset Alliance.

“We’re excited about the innovation possibilities on Android, and (we) look forward to delivering great products in partnership with Google and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA),” Motorola said in a statement.

Since the announcement of Android at the end of last year, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and LG Electronics all have been rumored to be interested in manufacturing an Android handset. HTC is the first to deliver an Android phone, the G1, which will be available later this month and sold by T-Mobile in the U.S.

Other handset manufacturers have laid low, however, keeping their Android plans quiet. For its part, Motorola has been working diligently to solve its ailing cell phone business. Earlier this year it decided to spin off its troubled cell phone division from the rest of the company.

Motorola might have its cell phone business in order, allowing it to publicly move ahead with its Android plans. Android, clearly an innovative open-source mobile OS, is viewed as an extension to a new mobile market opened up by Apple and the iPhone more than a year ago.

Motorola, as well as other manufacturers, is looking to innovate using the Android platform — and possibly reinvigorating its ailing cell phone division in the process.

Motorola, known more for engineering than its product design, stumbled upon the successful design of the Razr more than five years ago. The Razr was the world’s first super-thin “fashion” phone. But as engineering-based companies usually do, Motorola concentrated on milking the Razr for everything it was worth, and in the interim Apple came along with the iPhone and changed the wireless game forever.

As Robert Brunner notes in a new book, “Do You Matter? How great design will make people love your company,” Motorola “had only a single product, and now Motorola is back in trouble because it tried to repeatedly milk this one product over and over again, and it hasn’t worked.” Motorola did not “continue to grow, build on, and invest in what made the Razr successful. Instead, it chose to imitate, not innovate.”

Android, it seems, is Motorola’s (last?) opportunity to innovate.

Motorola-Android illustration by Engadget

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Report: HTC’s Android-powered “Google phone” may be delayed after all

Daniel Langendorf — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:08:23 +0000

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Developing a phone — even if it is just an operating system — is not something you do overnight with a bunch of cajoled software developers.

Just a week after High Tech Computer (HTC) said it was on schedule to deliver Android-powered cell phones by the 4Q of 2008, another report surfaces Thursday that says HTC is “having structural problems to incorporate Google’s demand feature set” and “demanding a guaranteed minimum revenue surety from Google,” according to Barron’s Tech Trader Daily.

Barron’s picked up a research note from Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research saying his “contacts” contend that HTC’s Android handset — the so-called Google phone — will be delayed until the first quarter of 2009.

Additionally, Chowdhry’s “contacts” tell him that another problem Google is having is attracting software developers to the platform. They’re too busy writing code for Windows Mobile, Nokia (Symbian), Research in Motion (BlackBerry), and Apple’s iPhone.

That’s no surprise. These guys actually have phones, real working phones, to develop for and test.

And while we’re on the subject of handset manufacturers, where’s mention of everybody else besides HTC? HTC, the world’s leading maker of smart phones as an ODM, has publicly stated it plans to come out in 2008 with an Android phone. Google swears there will be Android this year.

But what about Samsung? Or Motorola? Or LG? They’re supposedly going to deliver Google phones in 2009, but how’s that going? Sony Ericsson has fallen on hard times lately, so it’s conceivable that it’s worrying about its own problems, not the Gphone.

And let’s not forget that, while Apple has received mostly praise for the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 software update, the grand opening of the Apps Store, and the arrival of third-party applications for the platform, there’s still a lot of complaints about the OS crashing and buggy first-gen apps. It hasn’t been a super-smooth road for Apple, either.

So why do we think that HTC — or anybody else for that matter — is going to introduce an Android-powered phone in the 4Q of 2008? If someone does, chances are it will be a Gphone, loaded with Google apps, because from what we see there’s not even a hint of an Apps Store-like place for users to buy third-party applications written for the platform.

It’s not that I’m against a Google phone. Far from it. The cell phone world, especially in the U.S., needs Google, and Apple. These two can challenge other manufacturers to develop innovative new phones and together (hopefully) they can knock the siloed, we-don’t-really-want-openness-and-change carriers on their keisters.

Google should have developed its own damn phone. And even then, there’s no guarantee it would be ready for 4Q 2008.

Illustration credit: Android wallpaper, samuraispy on flickr

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Motorola launches movie store for cellphones, but will anybody bite?

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:50:10 +0000

Amid all the iPhone 2.0 hype, we missed the news last week that Motorola has launched a full-length movie store for its mobile phones. Before you ask: “Who wants to watch a feature film on their tiny cellphone screen, anyway?” Here are a few of the details.

The service is available first in the UK-only, but will eventually extend to France, Italy, Germany and Spain. The catalog is currently restricted to forty titles from one studio — Paramount Digital Entertainment — including “The Italian Job”, “Star Trek” and “Team America: World Police”, priced at between £5.99 and £8.99 per movie.

Unsurprisingly, movies can’t be downloaded ‘over-the-air’ directly to handsets but instead the service requires “side-loading” whereby content is downloaded to a PC first and then transfered onto a mobile phone. Motorola says this is so that customers avoid potentially expensive data charges but it also means that the service can bypass carriers who may offer a competing service. Users will still need to be able to connect their phones to the Internet, however, as each side-loaded movie has to have its DRM certificate verified online, and each device must be registered with Motorola’s store.

“Sideloading is a good option and in the next 12-18 months we’ll see quite a few other players enter this space. That’s why we wanted to get to market now so we’d be ahead of the curve”, Andrew Till, a senior director on Motorola’s multimedia team, tells The Guardian.

Addressing the central question of “whether people will really want to watch full-length films on their phones when they have a 2.4″ screen on their mobile and a 30″ screen at home”, Till says, “people see video on a mobile in a different way. They want something they can watch while they are on the treadmill, on an exercise bike or while they are commuting when they don’t want a large device. We know from the video consumption on phones that consumers want this.”

Of course, not all video consumption is equal, especially on mobile devices. Short form content, yes. Feature films, we’re not so sure. On that note, Till told The Guardian that ‘users typically watch films in chunks of between 22 and 26 minutes’.

Our point precisely.

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Mobile OS wars heat up as Verizon joins LiMo Foundation, a Google-Android rival

Daniel Langendorf — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:37:48 +0000

Here’s an interesting jab at Google and its mobile operating system Android: Verizon, the No. 2 U.S. carrier, is joining the LiMo Foundation because it has software and phones available, Google does not.

The LiMo Foundation, representing Linux Mobile, is the lesser known of the mobile operating systems. There’s Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, supplying many makers of smart phones; Symbian, supplier mostly to Nokia; Qualcomm, supplier mostly to Verizon; upstart Google, and Apple. Then there’s Linux Mobile, slowly creeping along by adding devices mostly in Europe and Asia.

The LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation is a consortium of companies well vested in the mobile industry: Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics, Vodaphone, NTT DoCoMo, and many others. Verizon is the first U.S. carrier to join the LiMo initiative, which now has 40 members worldwide.

The idea behind LiMo is to build a standardized, Linux-based mobile platform, which members can customize to meet their needs. For the most part, Linux Mobile is a competitor to Android, which is not yet available on any handsets. Linux Mobile is showing up on phones from Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, and LG.

Kyle Malady, vice president of network for Verizon, said in a conference call today that he expects Verizon to sell both regular devices and smart phones using mobile Linux next year.

“We expect that Linux Mobile will rapidly become our preferred operating system,” Malady said to The Associated Press [via The New York Times] . “As the development community looks at how best to bring new applications to the marketplace, they should check out LiMo and Linux Mobile first.”

Verizon’s move isn’t so much a slap in the face as a poke in the side to Google, which has somewhat of a rocky relationship with Verizon. The two companies were locked in a bidding war for the 700 MHz spectrum recently auction in the U.S.

Once a reserve was met in the auction, an open network clause was triggered, and Google ended its bidding. Verizon was left holding the goods, so to speak. The winner must build a new network open to any device and any application. Verizon has whined publicly that maybe Google didn’t play fair.

Verizon’s involvement with the LiMo Foundation does not preclude it from joining Google’s Open Handset Alliance and supplying Android phones in the future — it most likely will. But Verizon is sending a message that Google’s mobile OS isn’t ready and won’t be until devices start showing up at the end of 2008 and into 2009. Verizon isn’t going to be waiting around, twiddling its thumbs.

Maneuverings like Verizon joining LiMo never register on the consumer mobile radar because, after all, they’ve been buying phones mostly on size and looks for years.

But with the success of the iPhone and BlackBerry products and the coming of the smart information device, mobile operating systems are becoming more important and a hotly contested battleground.

[For more information on LiMo, see GigaOm’s recent coverage.]

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HTC launches first true iPhone competitor just as Apple is about to take its phone to next level

Daniel Langendorf — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:02:20 +0000

It’s about time. Well, sort of.

Taiwanese smart phone manufacturer HTC launched the Touch Diamond today and, as expected, it’s small, sleek, sexy, very iPhone-esque, and promising.

Unfortunately for those of us in the U.S. or Latin America, the Diamond will not be available until the second half of 2008. If you’re in European markets, the phone begins shipping in June, followed by Asia and the Middle East.

As you know, much has been said about the iPhone since its launch last June. Ever since then, any phone released by any manufacturer is compared with the iPhone.

But so far, no one has come close to the iPhone’s design, interface, usability, user experience, and overall satisfaction, although Nokia’s offerings are popular. One “phone” promised to take on the iPhone, but the so-called Gphone, running Google’s mobile operating system Android, hasn’t been released by any manufacturer yet, it isn’t expected until the fourth quarter, and is completely untested in the market.

The Touch Diamond certainly has impressive specs — a 2.8-inch, 680×480 VGA display, quad-band, 3G, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, HSDPA support, a 3.2-megapixel camera, 4GB internal storage, 256MB flash memory, 192MB RAM, and SD external storage. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and a full Web browser in Opera. And, as previously stated, its darn attractive.

But without having one to play with, it’s impossible to say how the Touch Diamond stacks up to the iPhone experience. For sake of argument, let’s hope HTC’s new phone is compelling and scares the pants off Apple in the name of competition.

Chances of that happening, however, are slim as Apple is about to move into the next phase of the iPhone’s life — as evidenced by all the rumors of the coming 3G phone, expected to be announced in early June with availability following shortly thereafter.

If Apple has played its hand right, the iPhone is poised to enter 2.0-land far ahead of everybody else, especially with a 3G offering, enterprise support, and third-party applications coming soon. HTC, Nokia, Gphone makers, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and BlackBerry have yet to even hit with successful 1.0 products.

Apple also has a marketing and publicity advantage in the U.S., where Nokia is well known but doesn’t sell as many phones as it does worldwide. HTC has almost no name recognition, although it is slowly gaining in prominence.

While the HTC Touch Diamond appears to be a compelling product worthy of challenging the iPhone, we’ll have to wait and see it in action here in the States. And by then, iPhone 2.0 will be out. Will anybody even remember HTC?

Additional coverage: engadget, gizmodo, Cnet.

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Huh? Motorola rumored to be planning movie download service for its mobile devices

Daniel Langendorf — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:53:31 +0000

Note to Motorola: Forget about the movies. Concentrate on getting cool new phones on the market. Otherwise, the movies won’t matter.

According to UK magazine New Media Age (via MocoNews and Ars Technica), troubled Motorola is rumored to be planning a movie service for its mobile devices. So far, only Paramount has licensed content to Motorola, but the phone maker is supposedly working out deals with other studios.

There are few details: no name for the service, no pricing, no idea if movies are for rent or purchase or both, if there is any DRM in place (we suspect so), or an official release date. The service may be available by the end of May.

Users will not be able to download movies directly to their phones. They’ll have to download flicks first to their PCs and then sync, or “sideload”, the content to their mobile devices. This doesn’t sound very inventive to us.

In fact, it sounds downright weird, all things considered. Does Motorola really think that offering a movie service that’s a semi-hassle to manage will entice more people to buy their phones? Is this the way Motorola plans to erase that $1.2 billion operating loss last year, or get investors excited when the company splits its mobile division from the rest of the company?

Our advice: Worry about getting cool new phones on the market to compete with Nokia, Apple, Samsung, LG, and the highly-anticipated Google-powered Android phones. Otherwise, Motorola has bigger problems than the latest Hollywood releases.

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