Motorola splits in two, Chinese competitors move in
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008Motorola has split itself two, separating its loss-making mobile phone manufacturing division from its highly profitable broadband and mobility solutions division. Motorola really had no choice, as its weak mobile phone division was dragging the company down, despite its enterprise mobility solutions division reporting record profits of $1.2 billion in the most recent quarter, a jump of 43%.
Motorola will still be selling mobile phones. However, its focus will now obviously be on its more profitable division, leaving Nokia and Samsung free to carve up the US as the company’s mobile phones division simply cannot compete effectively.
Motorola’s decline from number one to number three
“Motorola today is in the same situation it was in yesterday,” Carmi Levy, senior VP for strategic consulting at AR Communications, told EETimes. “It lacks a viable product map and continues to lose market share to competing vendors that are consistently bringing better products to market.”
Motorola, once number one in the world for mobile phones, is now number three, with Nokia commanding a dominant 40% of the market, and Samsung recently overtaking it to secure the number two spot. Both Nokia and Samsung are forging ahead with superb new converged devices that cram in tonnes of features, as well as designer phones that make Motorla’s RAZR look like a 1970s dinsoaur.
Indeed, it was the RAZR that proved to be Motorola’s nemesis. Launched in 2004, it became the most successful mobile phone in the world, but rather than build on its success, Motorola relied on its design too much, and simply launched variants that were pale shadows of the original, and which increasingly struggled to compete with the new phones that were launched by Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG.
With no new exciting phones on the horizon, the future looks bleak for Motorola’s handset division.
The competition closes in
“What a celebration if you are a competitor,” said Ellen Daley, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “I think if you are Nokia and Samsung, you put your sights on the North American market and grab as much as you can.”
And they’re not the only ones. Chinese device manufacturers HTC and UTStarcom are also eying up the US market, and are tipped to show off some of their own new mobile phones at next week’s CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas in an effort to steal some of Motorola’s eroding market share before Nokia and Samsung take it all for themselves.
Of course, Motorola is still making mobile phones - it’s not like the company has gone out of business. However, by splitting itself in two, Motorola is making it known that if anybody wants to buy the mobile phone division, it won’t exactly be turned away at the door. Times change fast in the mobile phone world, and a new, more nimble owner may be the only way that Motorola’s phones can compete in the break-neck pace of the market.
This presumably means a plethora of new rumours will emerge through the coming months as the name of every electronics manufacturer will be pitched as a potential new owner. We’ll keep you posted on all the developments as they happen.
[Source: EETimes]
We’ve already gotten a pretty good idea of what NASA’s new Chariot lunar vehicle was capable of, but now thanks to NewScientist (and NASA itself) we’ve got a glimpse of the behemoth in action — on Earth, of course. As you can see for yourself after the break, the rig certainly looks to be quite capable of tearing it up on the lunar surface, with it boasting a plough to smooth things out for a moon base (or other potential lunar installations). What’s more, while they’re apparently not quite ready to be demoed just yet, NASA also has plans to outfit it with a drill and a back hoe, but apparently not a laser cannon — at least none that they’re tellin’ us about.
Wisair, the folks who are responsible for wireless USB solutions has just released a brand new SDIO Wireless USB solution which features the Wisair WSR601 low-power single chip within, enabling users to enjoy the benefits of wireless USB connectivity in portable devices that accept SD memory cards such as digital cameras, cell phones, and camcorders among others. The only problem now would be to find a wireless USB hub of sorts to go along with this SDIO wireless USB solution. 
I remember during the late 1990s and early 2000s saw cell phones take the “smaller and lighter” route, with each new model deemed “good” or “excellent” based on its size first, and functions second. Who could forget about the race to have the smallest handset? Nokia’s 8xxx series and Ericsson’s colorful flip handsets definitely forged a path for everyone else to follow, but somewhere along the way cell phone design experienced a paradigm shift. Manufacturers realized that consumers wanted their cell phones to do more than just carry out conversations and send text messages - which is why handsets from then on started to get bigger and heavier due to the inclusion of more features. Fast forward to where we are today, it is a pretty tricky balancing act to figure out what consumers want - to do everything a high-end Nokia Communicator can without forcing you to tighten your belt by two notches to prevent the handset’s weight from dropping your pants. This is where the Modu phone comes in, as it has just picked up the title of the world’s lightest phone.
The Modu Mini phone has now reached an official status of “the lightest mobile phone in the world”. It weighs a puny 1.4 ounces and measures just .3 inches thick. The record was recorded by the Guinness book of world records.
