Motorola

Remember when Motorola's Razr was the hottest cell phone around? That seems like ancient history now, huh? Moto flirted with a series of Windows Mobile based smartphones over the years. I used a Moto MPX-220 Windows Mobile non-touchscreen phone for a while myself. I thought it was pretty good except for a bizarre proprietary connector that wore out a bit quickly. GigaOm says that Moto will announce their Android smartphone lineup at GigaOm's Mobilize 09 event...

Exclusive: Motorola Confirms It Will Launch Android Devices at Mobilize 09

Will Android help Moto revive their smartphone fortunes? Quite honestly, I have no idea. But, I sure hope at least one model has a physical QWERTY keyboard. And, I sure hope I don't see another bunch of iPhone copycat models from Moto.

Photo courtesy of Motorola

Give Motorola some credit for putting in a unique feature in the MOTO 7...

Motorola Announces MOTO W7 Active Edition With Gesture Controls

No, not the "gesture controls." Look further down the press release to the part that reads...

MOTO W7 is also designed to move with you. A built-in step pedometer counts and records your daily walks and runs to make every step count. Work out on your own terms with a Personal Trainer application that creates a personal profile and helps you to set goals, create workout profiles and review summary reports.

I like the idea of this pedometer feature and its associated software a lot.

The phone also features:

- FM radio
- MP3 player
- 2 megapixel camera supporting still and video recording
- Accelerometer (for the pedometer & gesture features)
- Stereo Bluetooth
- microSD slot that supports up to 8GB microSD flash storage cards

It's not a good day for Motorola: its long-term corporate credit rating was lowered to junk status by Standard & Poor's, CNET News reports, as the company continues to endure declining cell phone sales.

The ratings service dropped its score for Motorola specifically because of the trouble the handset part of the business has seen for the past two years.

"The problems are so grave at the company, which reported huge losses for the third quarter, that Motorola is delaying its planned spinoff of the handset division and restructuring the entire business in the hope that it can finally create products that will excite consumers," the report said.

Simply put, the company hasn't had a hit phone since the RAZR back in 2004. Motorola also seems to have missed a shift in the industry toward touchscreen devices.

Sell on the rumor, sell even more on the news? Motorola has confirmed earlier reports that it will be cutting jobs in earnest, PC World reports, saying late Friday that $800 million in cuts planned for 2009 will require laying off about 3,000 workers.

A spokesperson said in the article that of the company's current tally of 66,000 employees, about 3,000 layoffs will be made globally "across all businesses and functions" with a "little over two-thirds of these layoffs in the handset division."

Ellen Daley, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said in the article that the layoffs are necessary, even though they will obviously be hard on the individual workers. "They have to do something at Motorola," she said in the report. "They are losing market share, they are bleeding and they are inefficient. Job cuts happen when you are not making enough money to support the jobs."

Motorola hasn't had a hit product since the original, non-mobile-media-capable RAZR in 2004, which stopped making money early on, after the company decided to flood the market with variations that eventually became free after signing a two-year contract.

Sanjay Jha, Motorola co-CEO and former Qualcomm exec who is in charge of resurrecting Motorola's mobile devices division, is about to slash jobs in an attempt to rein in costs, Engadget reports.

According to the article, Jha said to employees that Motorola seems to have anywhere from two to three times as many employees working on individual projects as the other major manufacturers (which we presume to mean LG, Samsung, and others.)

The cuts are reported to be in the works for as early as Thursday (tomorrow), numbering in the thousands.

Motorola has announced the Aura, a $1,999 luxury cell phone that the handset vendor hopes will be a RAZR-sized hit for the well-heeled, Yahoo Tech reports.

What could possibly make a handset worth two grand? The Aura features a swivel design, which some of Motorola's earlier handsets exhibited—but this time, manufactured to Rolex-like tolerances, according to the report. It includes a 62-carat sapphire lens, a fully circular LCD display that Motorola claims is the first ever, an etched stainless steel form factor, PVD coating that mimics high-end watches, and an all-aluminum keypad.

As for tech specs, it's pretty pedestrian, with 2GB of internal storage, a 2 megapixel camera, basic MPEG-4 video playback, an MP3 player, and no 3G support.

Well, that sure didn't last long. Back in April, Motorola reorganized its handset unit in preparation to spin the division off to a third-party, placing Rod Shaddock at the head of its mobile devices consumer products group. RCR Wireless News is reporting that Shaddock is now leaving the company.

The report said that going forward, John Cipolla will lead the consumer products group and report directly to new co-CEO Sanjay Jha, the company said. Cipolla originally (well, at least since April) was heading up the company's midrange and high-end phone groups. "Motorola said that Shaddock's departure has been in the works since before Jha was appointed head of mobile devices earlier this month." Motorola had reorganized again in July, incidentally. Where it stops, nobody knows.

Motorola may be in plenty of trouble, but that hasn't stopped the company from continuing to release mobile media-focused handsets. Gearlog reports that the company's latest product intro includes the MOTOROKR EM30, a candybar phone using Motorola's ModeShift technology; the ROKR EM28 (pictured), a flip phone with extra audio features and touch-sensitive keys; and the ROKR EM25, a slider with FM radio sharing capabilities.

The EM28's touch-sensitive keys only appear "when needed," the report said; the phone also includes 3-D sound, 11 audio EQ modes, and a 9 dB bass booster for blowing out your eardrums when listening to Kanye West's "Stronger." The EM25, meanwhile, includes a built-in FM tuner and lets users share FM radio songs with each other.

Interestingly, the ROKR EM30's keypad uses Motorola's ModeShift technology to switch from red in music mode to blue in phone mode, the report said. It also shows the song title and artist from Internet radio streaming. Unfortunately we're not getting this one here in the states, though—just the first two.

As we reported late yesterday, Motorola has hired Sanjay Jha from Qualcomm in order to head up the company's handset business and act as co-CEO. As Fortune writes, the move comes just months after Motorola said it would separate the handset business from the rest of the companies, in an olive branch to dissident shareholder Carl Icahn.

"Critics of the splitup plan say little will be accomplished by breaking Motorola's money-losing handset business off from its profitable networking and enterprise mobility operations," the report said. Fortune has previously claimed that the move will mean higher costs and less access to resources in the future.

With the new executive in place to run the division, Motorola has officially dug in its heels, even as they continue to lose market share at an alarming rate.

Motorola lured away Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha to become co-CEO and head of its ailing handset business in preparation for a planned spin-off.

Jha is taking control of the mobile devices unit from Moto chief Greg Brown, who has been handling since former device head Stu Reed left in March. Brown and Jha will now share the CEO position until the mobile business spins off, an event that's supposed to happen in the third-quarter of 2009.

Jha definitely has his work cut out for him. Its share of the mobile phone market has been halved over the past two years thanks to more advanced handsets from Nokia and a little phenom called the iPhone.

According to a Bloomberg report, Motorola said it will release 34 devices by year-end, which makes us wonder is maybe it got "quality" and "quantity" mixed up.

Regarding Jha's appointment, Morgan Keegan & Co. analyst Tavis McCourt told Bloomberg that it might be a couple of years before we see how Jha affects the actual product, while his effect on the business itself will be apparent sooner. "Probably his biggest impact will be the level and type of engineering talent he will attract to the company over time," said McCourt.

(Image credit: Seokyong Lee/Bloomberg News)