We have reported last week, that Motorola's mobile department is to be separated from the company. After a long list of guesses it seems that Apple has cast an eye on Motorola, at least all signs show this and a picture has become available that shows how Steve Jobs' company is trying to exploit the successful style of Motorola's handsets. Apple has already written history with iPhone and now they can do a major progress in becoming one of the most significant manufacturers.
Motorola has been established in 1928 under the name Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, the currently used name has only been given in 1947, but it has been practically used since the '30s. The two founders, Paul and Joseph Galvin, have changed the name when the company started manufacturing car radios; the world Motorola symbolized sound in motion. The name is nowadays known mostly because of cell phones, few might know that Motorola was the company to make the world's first walkie-talkie. The company, that had better days, has once had partnership with Apple, as they were the ones to manufacture the processors of Macintosh and Power Macintosh.
Unfortunately the American company has been having financial problems for a few years, as a matter of fact V3 was their last handset to bring about success. While their market share in the USA was at 23 percent in 2006, this number has decreased to 12.4 percent in 2007. At the beginning of the year many independent market analysts have forecast that the company is probable to leave the mobile manufacturing market, thus consolidating their position in governmental and professional segment. It has been another important event that in February Carl-Henric Svanberg, CEO at Swedish Ericsson, has announced that if Motorola is truly selling its mobile phone department, than his company would probably be willing to buy it, thus further strengthening Sony Ericsson's dominance.
It turns out, however, according to all signs, that not Ericsson, but Apple, working behind the curtains, was the one to buy Motorola's mobile phone division. This means that Apple's market share on the American smartphone market has increased from 19.5 to 26.9 percent. It turns out from leaked information that the company is not planning to sell new devices with Motorola logo, but they won't be abandoning Motorola models that are already ready, so the last phone to bear the Motorola logo is probably going to be Z10.
The transaction is a great smack in the face of Microsoft, as Motorola's Q series, running Windows Mobile operating system, is extremely successful in the USA. Of course there are no plans on stopping the production of business smartphones, but these, in the future, are not going to have the operating system from the giant of Redmond, but the modified Mac OSX, already known from iPhone. The first of these devices has been already announced secretly; it's name being a bit funny: iMoto.
Development is probably in a very early state, as only the design plan (pictured below) has become available, which, by the way, has FCC's logo on it, meaning that the manufacturer has already requested approval from the authority. The full specifications of the interesting Apple-Motorola hybrid are not yet known, it's only sure that it's not going to specialize in multimedia, which is emphasized by the size of the internal memory: the device will only have 1 GB of expandable storage space. According to the picture, the handset is going to have a collapsible keypad (clamshell form factor), thus having the traditional Motorola design. The phone will be very advanced in means of data transfer. The European edition will support 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth and have an infra port and a GPS receiver too. It is expected that software indispensable for business use is going to be further developed, and, furthermore, iMoto will also have a fingerprint-reader too.
Of course Apple didn't pay this supposedly large sum only to increase their market share and to have business phones. They want to profit from Motorola's camera developments too, since the company has recently made an agreement with Kodak, so next-gen iPhones are supposed to have a camera with large picture sensors and autofocus.
The sad part of the story is, that following the acquisition, the market has lost another, important competitor. It is unfortunately unknown how the warranty issues of current Motorola phone owners are going to be resolved, but we can tell for sure that Apple won't be forgetting about them, since the company considers such things as being very important.
iMoto's microsite is expected to go online next week at www.apple.com/iMoto.
