American’s are crazy for both the iPhone and the G1, the T-Mobile Android phone, basically because they love American products. They are also in love with Motorola handsets, which even after the worst two quarters in that company’s history, it remains the leading US brand.
Which is why analysts there are gung-ho about the idea that Motorola will introduce an Android handset, evidenced by unconcealed recruitment campaigns, picked up by US papers, searching for Android developers.
Honestly Motorola might just as well advertise its products roadmap, given that there is no such thing yet as an Android developer (the SDK is barely stable and any handset developer worth his salt would pick it up in an afternoon). But this is pretty much what Motorola is doing, and the significance to Europe, is that Motorola may well try to rescue its plummeting global market share, but racing HTC and its operator partner T-Mobile, to introduce Android handsets here as well as in the US. Whereas a win in China for Motorola with an Android phone, where once it was market leader, would do much to return it to the golden days.
Most US thinkers on the subject admit that Motorola has lost the plot and the handsets design wars, due to poor attention to software detail, and feel that a shift to open architectures where someone else has designed the software platform, would be a good move for the company.
What’s ridiculous is that this wasn’t considered a likely move ‘before’ the US handset maker put out job adverts, suggesting that it would like to increase its Android team from 50 to 350. In fact it was an obvious move. One of the leading chip makers who has been helping with the Android effort is Qualcomm, and Qualcomm recently lost its COO Sanjay Jha (pronounced Shah) to become the Motorola co-CEO, in charge of handsets.
If you add to that the fact that Motorola has long been one of the pioneers of Linux on a handset, and that the Android platform relies on this, and that Motorola was one of the founder members of the Open Handset Alliance which backs Android and other forms of handset openness, and you have a clear set of messages about Motorola’s intentions, despite its recent love affair with Symbian.
It is perhaps only the size of the team, which might cost Motorola something in the region of $50 million a year to support, which suggests how big a bet Motorola might be making in Android. And presumably this team of 350 people it is recruiting won’t simply sit and port Android to Motorola handsets. If that was their role, then it would be Linux engineers or handset designers that Motorola was after, no it’s more likely that this team will be engaged writing applications that make the Android environment have the breadth of software offerings that its rivals offer on operating systems like Symbian, and that many of these form a software eco-system associated with the Motorola brand.
A handset vendor only starts recruiting applications programmers once the device is getting close to market, so we would expect that Android devices with the Motorola logo on are far closer to launch than this story suggests. And with Samsung and LG sure to go down the same route (even Nokia may not resist the temptation to launch an Android phone, given that it is seeking to gets its US market share into double figures, especially since it has been seen at Android developer meetings) this will all add momentum to Android and bring forward the date when a non-US operator will want to source the devices.