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Oct 20 2008 10:38am EDT
Moto Android Phone: No Surprise, and Very Late
Kevin Maney writes: Lots of buzz on the Web about Motorola's eventual Android-based touch-screen phone, but Motorola has been talking about it openly for a while. Apparently Motorola has come far enough along to talk specifics with carriers, but the phone isn't supposed to be out until the second quarter of 2009, putting Moto's phone at least 9 months behind the first Android phone -- forever in cell phone years.
Over the summer, Moto co-CEO Sanjay Jha (soon after he was hired) told me: "We're already working on a touch screen phone with a QWERTY keyboard. In China we sell three devices with a touch screen." He added: "We recognize the challenges in front of us and have a plan."
Moto's other co-CEO, Greg Brown, added: "Sanjay has a unique background with Google and Android. We're evaluating the next evolution around open operating systems."
Motorola, though, has been talking to Google about Android since the tenure of the previous CEO, Ed Zander, who left a year ago. Zander used to work at Sun with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and last fall Zander said he'd been talking to Google about what was then only known as the "Google phone."
While Motorola can stir up some excitement with an Android phone, the company is still burdened by building phones on too many different platforms. Some Moto phones are still running a Moto operating system called P2K, which was supposed to die in 2004. Some run Windows Mobile. A lot of underlying software gets tweaked for specific phones and specific carriers. All this adds to Moto's time to getting a phone to market. (Nokia, by contrast, builds all its phones on one software platform.)
Jha is trying to untangle this mess, but it's still a mess.
In the meantime, there's speculation that economic conditions are killing Moto's chances for spinning off its handset division as planned.
