“Engineers at Motorola are hard at work on a sophisticated handset, to be released next year, that parent Google hopes will provide more potent competition for devices like Apple’s iPhone, said people familiar with the matter.” Well, paint me red and call me a girl scout. This is more fascinating: “Motorola also ran into difficulties when it looked into using a bendable screen and materials such as ceramics that would allow the company to make the X Phone more stress resistant, use more colors and mold into different shapes, these people said.” Bendable displays could be a huge turning point for mobile – and not because they allow new shapes. No, the killer ‘feature’ of bendable displays will be their resilience.
I hope Google can find a way to get its Nexus phones on multiple carriers with LTE, and to stop encouraging vendors to keep ruining the stock Android experience with their shitty bloatware. I’d even be happy with ‘fake’ Nexus devices, like the VErizon one, if they’d just keep the bootloader unlocked.
As an Android user, I’m tired of having only one phone a year to choose from, especially since the newest one was back-ordered for weeks, and is now sold out online. If they’re only going to make one a year though, then it SHOULD be top of the line, and none of this max 16gb BS. Oh, and how about releasing some goddamn accessories when you launch new devices, Google?
I think the Nexus 7 pogo dock is just now starting to make the rounds.
As an Android user, I’m tired of having only one phone a year to choose from
Are we living in the same reality? I see zillions of different Android phones out there.
News: everyone is working on new computer, and they won’t have flexible displays. News
People will look back to this time and laugh that we were carrying around brittle glass phones.
…unless Google wants to become an hardware first company and believe Mot can outdo Samsung and Apple in hw design (given their track record, an extremely naive assumption) of course. such an announcement would kill Android leverage in no time leaving them with nothing.
Android dominance is currently based on a soft power, where competitive interests of HW companies, software houses and carriers are playing out on more or less level playing field, and it’s based on a very volatile balance. One that can be crushed with one bad move such as this one.
It’s not a bad move, really. Motorola is just like any other Android manufacturer and Android will not be a Motorola exclusive. This is just adding a new player to the fray (I know it’s not really a new player, but you know what I mean).
Google must be unhappy or at least disconcerted with how the Android OEM ecosystem has turned out. One must presume that by releasing Android Google had hoped that there would develop a healthy and diverse OEM community which would allow them to sit above, it a bit like Microsoft had done with Windows OEMs, except this time Google would make it’s money from the bundled services rather than software lisences.
It hasn’t turned out like that.
Android has been forked (Amazon and Barnes & Noble) and been embraced up by Chinese OEMs who have promptly stripped Google services out. The biggest worry however has to be that Samsung has become so disproportionately more profitable and larger than all the other OEMs. The danger now is that Samsung decides to develop it’s own services and forks Android and dumps Google. Were that to happen Google would face a booming Android market that it’s hard work and expenditure on OS development has built but with little or no return to show for it.
The Motorola/Google handset route is dangerous because if it results in a handset that actually sells in quantity it is the other Android OEMs, including Samsung, who will suffer.
The road ahead is tricky for Google.
Google already has the Nexus brand, which offers some good, open, supported devices across a lot of hardware makers. I have no doubt that a Motorola Nexus phone will come, but I double all the future Nexus phones will be Motorola.
Well, what did they expect to happen with they released Android as open source? If you give something away for free, you can bet people will use it especially if it’s complete, as indeed Android is. Google have some of the best engineering talent in the business, but their business sense is lacking sometimes. Why, exactly, would an OEM with a vested interest in maximizing the profit for themselves want to allow Google to collect money from services if they have equivalent services? This is business 101 material here. Google’s only way to make the kind of money they hoped on Android is, at this point, to release a top quality phone even if it does upset their OEMs. However, they’d better make sure it is the absolute best Android smartphone on the market at a fair price, and send it out to as many international markets as they can if they want to take over from companies like Samsung or HTC.
Going by the WSJ article, Google’s just doing what they said they’d do: Install new management to whip Moto into shape, but give them no special access to Android development. It’s a delicate balance, but anything less would be a waste of Moto.
Besides, what are phone makers gonna do, jump to Windows? Microsoft’s doing the same thing with Nokia.
Really hope this turns out to be something good. Unless you like the heavily mangled versions of Android that HTC and Sony offer, Samsung and the Nexuses are the only real choice (I don’t consider LG and Motorola an option, after my Optimus 2X took 16 months to receive a promised upgrade and the 4X launched with an already obsolete version, or after Motorola’s “raw deal”). Time for some more options?
Edited 2012-12-23 16:26 UTC