By Chris Green in Reader
Posted in 2G, 3G, Motorola, Mobile Phones, Smartphones on November 30, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Today’s news that Motorola’s current chief executive Ed Zander will step down from the role in January came as little surprise.
After enjoying monumental success with products such as the RAZR V3 mobile phone, the company has struggled for the last two years to find its next big thing. Attempts to do different phone alongside the V3 have struggled, and the V3 itself could only be reinvented so many times before it too became stale and dated.
As a result, profits and expectations are down. It is a story not too dissimilar from the demise of Rover, except Motorola actually has the money and the expertise to build a whole new model, not just rely on dressing up the same old legacy units to make them look faux new. They just haven’t managed to do it.
The RAZR2, the long-awaited next generation of the RAZR V3 is an utterly brilliant phone, easily the best phone Motorola has ever made and a huge improvement over the V3. But it doesn’t excite in the same way the V3 did, and it is nowhere near as stylish. Despite all the innovation, it still smacks of being the end product of an explosion in a components factory. It is over-engineered. on the outside, as well as on the inside. The V3 kept it simple outside, while the R&D boys went mad with the bits we don’t need to see - the way it should be.
The Q9H is without a doubt the best Windows Mobile smartphone ever produced, and has a fantastic keyboard, better even than by beloved BlackBerry 6230. Trouble is - NOBODY, and I do mean nobody, among the usual mobile phone or PC suspects, carry or sell it. I had a pre-production unit, I loved it, it died (I always knew it was a pre-production unit with unfinished software, so this is not a black mark for Motorola or the device), I wanted to buy one with my own money, but neither of the networks I have contracts with carry it, and the only independent retailer in the UK I found selling it would only sell it off-contract, putting it beyond practical financial reach.
Having lifted Motorola’s fortunes with the V3, and with it made this stuffy company and its products hip and cool, Zander sadly blew it by failing to maintain the momentum. Withy competitors old and new including Nokia, Samsung, Apple, HTC, LG and even Chinese outfit ZTE capitalising on Motorola’s problems, where next for the once mighty electronics maker?
If there is one thing we know about the mobile phone industry, it is that yesterday’s nobody can be tomorrow’s market leader, and it only takes one product to do it - it happened for Nokia, and for Ericsson, and Motorola have been knocked off the top spot before only to get back into the running. It is one thing to replace the chief executive, but if promoting chief operating officer Greg Brown into the hot seat doesn’t also bring with it massive and radical change in the way the company designs its devices, then it will ultimately be pointless. The public have voiced their opinion in the most meaningful way possible, by not buying the current crop of products.
Chearly a new apporach to product design and specification is needed to excite and capture the imagination of a buying public in a market saturated by largely dismal phones.
Rated: 77.14% (7 votes)
Loading ...Comment by - December 11, 2007 on 8:30 pm
And why did the Q for Europe not have GPS in when the equivalent US Q did?
Some of the huge success of the RAZR was down to the pink version that made a nice present for Valentines and Mother’s Day (check the sales figures for the spring quarters). But I’m going to keep saying that I hate the RAZR interface and I think putting a help system in is an admission of guilt.
M
Comment by - June 15, 2009 on 11:22 am
Hi,
Well the downloading system Motorola mobile is very good but one thing
is to noticed is that phone memory is very low.
Make a comment
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