Motorola to ditch Symbian, bet on Android and outsource WinMo phone production

Wall Street Journal today has an interesting article (subsrciption required) about the changes coming to the struggling Motorola handset division.

The article details the changes in Motorola strategy initiated by the new head of handset division Sanjay Jha, that may be announced during Motorola’s earnings conference call on Thursday.

Under this plan Motorola will abandon the development on the many cellphone OS’es it’s been using, leaving just three of them.

• Google Android will become the major platform for Motorola phones, with the hopes that strong developer community and application ecosystem will boost the handset sales and help  to compete with RIM and Apple. But there won’t be any Moto Android phone until next year.
• Motorola’s P2K platform will be the one used in it’s low end phones.
• Windows Mobile will be the OS for Motorola’s business phones. But Motorola is looking for the possibilities to outsource at least some WinMo handset production to third parties.

So, what does this all mean?

It looks like Motorola is ditching Symbian as a platform of choice for it’s smartphones. We can also expect the cancellation or significant delay of many Motorola handsets currently in the pipeline.

And those employees working on the customization of soon to be abandoned Motorola phone platforms may just have become redundant. So another round of layoffs should be coming soon.

Overall, the situation does not look very good for Motorola in the beginning of 2009. But if they can get through this period, consolidate their operations and get some really good Android handsets for the next Christmas season, things might look much better coming into 2010.

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Posted on 29 Oct 08 - Filed in Motorola, Wireless - Comments - Written by Staska

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