Hello Android
The harsh reality of the mobile phone industry is that many of the things that used to be differentiators are now commoditised. It's getting harder for both operators and handset-makers to make a compelling case for using them rather than their competitors.
No handset-maker has had to do more soul-searching in recent years than Motorola, which has seen its market-share drop dramatically from the glory days of the RAZR, etc. The company is going to split itself in two, with the handset half being headed-up by former Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha. His strategy seems to be to focus almost entirely on Android-based smartphones.
As a result we've seen an avalanche of Android launches since Q4 last year. Motorola marketing director Tom Satchwell came to the HEXUS studios recently armed with three of them: the Dext, the Backflip and the Milestone. In our interview he talks us though some of their key features.
Satchwell is keen to draw attention to Motorola's own Motoblur platform, which appears on its more consumer-oriented phones, and is designed to offer a kind of unified communications interface. With most handset-makers and operators focusing on facilitating social networking on their smartphones, Motorola thinks it offers more than most in this area.