Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha says Motorola will reduce the "incremental innovation" that can be found in the company's Android portfolio.
Motorola will
make fewer-but more differentiated-Android devices going forward, according to
company CEO Sanjay Jha.
In an
interview with The Verge, Jha said that, driven by a desire
to make better use of marketing dollars, the company "wants to make fewer
phones."
Jha also
defended the creation of branded user interfaces over the mobile operating
system, by Motorola and its competitors. "Verizon and AT&T don't want
seven stock [Android Ice Cream Sandwich] devices on their shelves," he
said. There's no viable profit, Jha added, in devices that aren't differentiated.
The move seems
a smart one, given that the mobile industry has created a competition out of
pitting the one new smartphone that Apple introduces every year-one phone that
it has untold numbers of brilliant minds working to perfect and beautify-against
the piles of Android-running phones released each year, with Razr-sharp robotic
and bionic names that too easily blend together.
Fewer, more
distinguishable phones-the device equivalent of a few good friends instead of a
room of acquaintances-might be a game-changer for Motorola, which since its
feature-phone heyday has struggled to keep up with the Android successes of
Samsung and HTC.
Jha's comments
come as Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, speaking at an event at the
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Jan. 10, denied that Android was suffering from fragmentation,
calling the ways that OEMs have customized the open-source platform
"differentiation."
Fragmentation-an
issue in which some Android devices can't use applications designed for
different versions of the OS-reportedly is frustrating consumers and developers
and costing carriers, on the whole, an estimated $2 billion annually in
customer support services and returns, according to a November report from
research firm WDS Mobile
Schmidt, while
not backing away from his comment, said that getting Android users all up to
Android 4.0, known as Ice Cream Sandwich, would solve the matter.
At CES,
Motorola also announced the expansion of its Android-running Droid family to
now include the Droid Razr in Purple and the Droid Razr Maxx-a "marathon
runner" of a phone that can reportedly run 21 hours on a single charge,
according to company officials. Motorola executives recently also announced two
new Droid Xyboard tablets, and said at the show that
Droid Razr and Razr Maxx run Gingerbread, or Android 2.3.5, but will be
upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich.
Motorola,
while lacking in vowels, clearly doesn't want for new devices. While Jha
reportedly defended the Droid Bionic and Droid Razr to The Verge, saying the Bionic had even been delayed, they
potentially represent what Motorola may cut back on-devices that could fit what
Jha calls "incremental innovation."
Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.
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