Motorolais planning a raft of mobile phones optimised for social
networking, the first of which is launched today.
In a
Reuters interview, Motorola co-CEO, Sanjay Jha, said Motorola
will produce "multiple tens" of Android-based handsets over the
next 15 to 18 months.
The move signals that Motorola, which tried and failed to sell
its handset division last year, is either committed to mobile
phones, or trying to make its mobile phone division saleable.
It was thought Motorola's mobile phone business was worth about
$8bn when it was put up for sale early last year, but there were no
takers.
The choices were to run it down, or invest in new products to
give it a boost. It was estimated that it would take about $500m to
a $1bn to spruce up the mobile phone product range.
Sanjay Jha, who joined Motorola from Qualcomm a year ago, made
the investment.
Today
Motorola launched the first of these multiple tens of Android-based
mobile phones called "Cliq" in the US and "Dext" everywhere
else, which plays to the web-based strengths of Android by offering
synching of contacts, posts, feeds, messages, e-mails, photos from
sources such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail and Yahoo. Orange
is selling it in Europe.
It is the second Android-based phone, the first coming from HTC.
"If we're doing well financially, our next big focus will be
Europe," said Jha, "it's too early for us to say what volumes will
be but clearly we'll do everything possible to make sure that
number is as large as can be."
Jha, an alumnus of Liverpool University, Strathclyde University
and the GEC Hirst Laboratories, took on the toughest job in the
mobile industry when he left the position of COO at Qualcomm to
take over at Motorola in August 2008.
Motorola's mobile phone operation had been floundering following
the success of RAZR.
The Motorola RAZR was the fastest selling mobile phone in
history, hitting the market in November 2004 and selling 50m units
in two years, driving Motorola's market share up from 16.3 per cent
in the fourth quarter of 2004 to 20.3 per cent in the fourth
quarter of 2006.
Then Motorola decided to pursue market share at the expense of
profit, and the business declined rapidly. When Jha took over,
Motorola's worldwide market share had declined to around 5%.
Android - open-source and web-oriented - is the vehicle Jha
chose to get the mobile phone business back to glory.
Data is expected to generate 95% of wireless traffic within the
next five years and many think the vast majority of the data
traffic will be generated by social networking traffic.
"A staggering amount of our business is Facebook-oriented over
our networks", says Andy Dunkin from the new technologies and
innovation access team at Vodafone. Professor Michael Walker, group
R&D director at Vodafone, says that 11 times more wireless
traffic is being generated by community chatting than by
person-to-person calls.
By making a raft of mobile phones optimised for social
networking, Jha is offering wireless operators the opportunity to
grab a big share of that social networking traffic.
This article orginally appeared on
Electronics
Weekly.