Motorola

Motorola was recently rumored to be looking to produce its own smartphone OS, thus bringing into question the company’s commitment to the Android platform. But CEO Dr. Sanjay Jha addressed those concerns this week by saying that currently, “nearly all of my focus is on Android.” He also committed Motorola to bringing Android 2.2 to all of its phones as quickly as possible, as it’s necessary in order to enable full Flash support. Motorola introduced its first Android phone, the Cliq, at our Mobilize conference last year; it also makes the top-selling Droid for Verizon.

Next Friday, Sprint will launch the Android-based EVO 4G, complete with a 4.3-inch screen and integrated 4G. I received a test handset from Sprint this week to review, so have shot a photo tour of it and compared it to two other hot Android phones — the Droid Incredible and the Nexus One.

The EVO is also one of the first phones with a front-facing camera for video chatting, which made the release of Fring’s Android app this week perfectly timed. Fring is a cross-platform chat app that handles IM, VoIP, text chatting and now for the first time on Android — video chatting.

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The story goes that this phone was left in a corporate Verizon gym in Washington, but before it was remotely locked the finder saw a text message confirming it was "unreleased". What is it? Why, the Motorola Droid Shadow. More »



Droid - Smartphone - Android - Motorola - Handhelds

Today during its keynote at I/O, Google officially announced that the latest version of Android, called Froyo, will feature tethering and wireless hotspot functionality — a big win for Android users. When we broke the news last week we questioned whether or not carriers would be able to disable or charge more for this functionality given that it was baked into the default Android OS. Unfortunately, at least as far as consumers are concerned, it sounds like carriers will get their say. In other words, expect at least some carriers to charge more for tethering.

I asked Hiroshi Lockheimer, who heads up engineering on Android, about the issue and the answer was confusing to say the least. Lockheimer said that Android doesn’t do anything special to tag data that’s being accessed through tethering, though carriers could probably find a way to detect it if they really wanted to. But they probably won’t have to, because Android is making it easy for carriers to either charge extra for, or disable entirely, tethering on the phones they sell. It sounds like these would both require small modifications to the OS.

That’s straightforward enough — carriers and OEMs have been molding Android to suit their needs for a while now. But what about phones that feature the “Google Experience”, which is the term used to describe devices that ship with the stock Android OS (Google Experience phones include the Motorola Droid and Nexus One)? Presumably carriers wouldn’t be able to insert their payment switch if the OS is unmodified, which means these phones could potentially get tethering included in their normal data plans.  We’ll have to wait to find out — Lockheimer said that the answer isn’t clear yet.

Quake III running on a Motorola Droid was impressive. But Quake III running on the Nexus One—no physical keyboard, a souped up processor—that's downright heavy metal. More »



Smartphone - Nexus One - Droid - Android - Motorola Droid

Smartphones carrying Google’s Android operating system outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, according to new research out today from NPD.

During the quarter, Android handsets accounted for 28 percent of smartphone sales, beating out iPhone OS and its 21 percent share. BlackBerry was the best-selling OS, with its devices capturing 36 percent of the market. NPD attributes the shift to strong sales of the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris.

The news follows a report last month from AdMob that showed Android’s share of the mobile OS market had actually grown past that of iPhone OS, at least in the US. Worldwide, iPhone OS still has a big lead, however, with 46 percent share compared to Android’s 25 percent. AdMob’s data is based on ad requests across mobile websites and applications.

With the new Droid Incredible reportedly selling quite well, this trend may continue in the near-term. However, the fourth-generation iPhone is expected to debut next month. Rumors that the iPhone will soon come to Verizon also continue to intensify, with that carrier’s customers indicating they are ready to welcome the device with open arms. If all of that happens, the numbers could quickly swing back in Apple’s favor. Stay tuned.

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Tags: android, apple, blackberry, Google, iphone, RIM, smartphones

NPD Group Says Android Phones Outselling iPhone in U.S. —

I think it’s all about Verizon — Android’s U.S. market share increase coincides exactly with the Motorola Droid’s debut.

iPhone and Android Fueling Worldwide Smartphone Growth —

Sales of smartphones grew 56.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to new figures from IDC, far outpacing the 21.7 percent growth of the overall mobile market. Handset makers Apple and Motorola exhibited the largest growth in terms of smartphones sold and both gained in market share, but even with 53 percent more smartphone sales than the prior year quarter, Nokia’s market share was unchanged. Research In Motion sold more BlackBerry devices in the first quarter of 2010 over 2009, but the overall market growth outpaced BlackBerry sales, and RIM’s market share dipped slightly as a result. Rounding out the top five handset makers, HTC sold 73.3 percent more converged handsets than it did in the prior year quarter and managed a slight gain in overall share.

	1Q10 Sales	1Q10 Share	1Q09 Sales	1Q09 Share
Nokia	21.5	39.3%	13.7	39.3%
Research In Motion	10.6	19.4%	7.3	20.9%
Apple	8.8	16.1%	3.8	10.9%
HTC	2.6	4.8%	1.5	4.3%
Motorola	2.3	4.2%	1.2	3.4%
Other	8.9	16.3%	7.2	20.6%

Source: IDC

Looking closely at which companies are growing their market share and which are treading water or losing share, the gainers all have something in common — they create smartphones that mainly run on either Apple’s iPhone OS or Google’s Android platforms. Apple, of course, is the only vendor that uses its own platform, while HTC and Motorola have turned to Android for most, if not all, of their recent smartphones. Android standouts from HTC include the Hero, Droid Eris, myTouch 3G, Nexus One and Incredible, while Motorola is finding success with its Droid, Devour, Cliq and Backflip. Hoping to turn this trend, Nokia and RIM recently announced new operating systems to better compete — Nokia will utilize Symbian 3 in new handsets such as the N8, while RIM plans to power future smartphones with BlackBerry 6 in the third quarter of 2010.

Related GigaOM Pro Research Report (sub req’d):

The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

Speaking of Motorola and RAZRs — they’re still up to their old tricks. Seriously, who would buy this? Front looks like a somewhat shitty iPhone rip-off with a tiny screen, but head over to BGR and look at the inner-UI. It looks just like my RAZR circa 2005.

I mean, seriously.

Guess How Many Different Mobile Phone Models Motorola Currently Sells:

The iPhone outsold 117 models — combined.

Motorola posts profit, strong sales; stock jumps:

The two key quotes:

However, it has lost its position as the largest U.S. maker of phones to Apple Inc. Motorola sold a total of 8.5 million phones in the quarter, while Apple sold 8.8 million iPhones.

and, maybe crazier:

Four years ago, when the Razr was still popular, Motorola sold 46.1 million phones in the first quarter.

Late last month, a number of sites noted that a very early build of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, was available to download for Android phones. However, that build wasn’t official as it was put together by an individual and optimized for the Droid device. Today, Mozilla has itself put out a pre-Alpha build of Fennec that should work at the very least on Droid and the Nexus One.

Mozilla is quick to note that this is a pre-Alpha build of the browser, and is only for testing purposes. But that isn’t stopping Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević from announcing it on his blog. “There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha).  But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop,” he notes.

To get this build, you can visit this link on your Android device. Or you can point your phone’s browser to: bit.ly/fennec-android. And yes, there’s a QR code on Vukićević’s blog post if you want to scan it, and download it that way. Whichever way you do it, you’ll need to make sure your settings allow you to install non-Market apps (go to Settings, Applications, and check “Unknown Sources”).

Some other warnings and notes to consider about the build from Vukićević:

• We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
• It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
• Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet.  This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
• You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it.
• You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.

He also notes that there’s an experimental version of Weave, Mozilla’s syncing tool that will work with this pre-Alpha build of Fennec. Visit this page and click on the “Experimental version” to find it.

AdMob Shows Android Traffic Passing iPhone —

ad network AdMob has released its March report. Surprisingly, perhaps, the report notes that advertising traffic on the Android phone has surpassed that on the iPhone.

Android ad traffic in the U.S. was 46% in March of this year versus iPhone's 32%.

Sponsor

Android's ad traffic has grown 32% per month, rising from 72 million requests in March of last year to two billion last month. Last March 12 manufacturers were responsible for 34 Android devices though only two, the HTC Dream and HTC Magic comprised 96% of total traffic. This year, that 96% was shared between 11 devices. The Motorola Druid has the most traffic, at 32%.

Although the fact that advertisers in the U.S. have elected to put more ads on Android than iPhone is a good indicator as to the desirability of that platform, Apple is still ahead of Google overall. Second quarter reports from Apple indicated that the company had sold 8.75 million iPhones in that three-month period. Android sold seven million in the whole of last year.

Top photo by Gene Wolf

Discuss

Android: Motorola Replaces Google's Location Engine With Skyhook —

Tomorrow, Motorola will announce that it plans to replace Google's location services on its Android phones with Skyhook's location engine. By default, all Android devices currently use Google's own location services to determine a phone's location based on GPS data from the phone and the location of nearby Wi-Fi access points and cellular towers. Skyhook, which pioneered this method to determine a device's location, made its name as the default location provider for Apple's iPhone and desktop operating systems. Adding Motorola to its partners will give Skyhook a strong foothold in the booming market for Android phones and applications.

Sponsor

Developers Won't Have to Change Anything

The first Motorola devices with Skyhook's location services as the default will ship later this year. According to Skyhook, developers won't have to make any changes to their Android apps to work with Skyhook's location engine. Motorola will simply replace Google's libraries with Skyhook's Core Location services.

As location becomes a more important part of a growing array of mobile apps, being able to quickly determine a phone's location even when inside and without a line of sight to the nearest GPS satellites becomes a necessity for developers. Skyhook, which launched in 2003, pioneered this system of using Wi-Fi access points to determine a device's location. Clearly, the engineers at Motorola felt that Skyhook's solution is currently superior to Google's services.

Over the last few months, a number of the Android developers we talked to voiced frustration with the quality of Google's location services on Android. Indeed, some of the most popular location-based applications on Android like ShopSavvy and Flixster already use Skyhook's Android libraries instead of Google's built-in services.

Discuss

The only question now:  Who is going to buy them?  I think they might be piecemealled off.

Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Just guesses here: HTC (for the patents).  HTC already has made a lot of Palm Phones.  Motorola (for the OS) - they are getting screwed by HTC and Android.  

Nokia already has Symbian and Maemo OSes.   Microsoft got burned too badly with Danger.  Blackberry just bought an OS company.  Google has Android (but wouldn't hurt to have some more patents)….anyone else?  Apple?

via Bloomberg

 

Motorola Droid Translates Dog Speak and Detects Bra Size [VIDEO] —

It can also be turned into a taser, change traffic lights, and much more…if you trust the latest viral video campaign from Motorola, that is.

Seven videos, available over at DROIDshortcuts’s YouTube channel, show how you can enable all these “features” by entering secret codes into your Droid. I may have fallen for the bra size one, but turning the Droid into a taser took it just a tiny bit too far.

Check out the videos below, and tell us what you think in the comments!

Tags: ad campaign, droid, Motorola, viral video

Google I/O Gives out Phones to Attendees —

Santa Google is delivering gifts early this year! Instead of being surprised at Google I/O’s keynote, attendees got an email this morning with a gift attached to it. Depending on the attendee’s country code, they will either receive a Motorola Droid or Nexus One phone as a gift.

Android will play a big role in this year’s Google I/O conference, so what better way to get developers excited than to give them an Android OS phone a month in advance. They’ll be able to familiarize themselves with the Android SDK way before the heading to the conference.

Google I/O would like the attendees to be put their new phones to work at the conference. A conference app will be available for download before May 19th, over 40 companies will be demo-ing their apps in the developer sandbox, so there will be more apps for us to test out, and they will continue the tradition of the SCVNGR game where attendees hunt and find hidden QR codes in the conference area.

More answers and questions about the Google I/O gift can be found here. And if you’re attending Google I/O 2010 in San Francisco, I’ll see you there!

Photo by Albertech.net, May 2009, Google I/O 2009