Motorola’s CEO Ed Zander’s been busy fending off the advances of activist investor Carl Icahn, who was looking to make Zander and the company’s management accountable for its missteps. It’s been quite obvious for a long time that the company didn’t have anything to build on the success of the RAZR, and now it’s feeling it. But the MOTOCEO has been trying to deflect some of the criticism by saying the company will announce some new 3G devices next week.
Apparently at an event in California this morning, ZNDR said that one of the devices will play 30 fps video, with the ability to watch high-quality movies from an SD card. That’s great; can’t wait to see it. But it sounds like another sign that the company is fundamentally lost.
When the rest of the mobile industry is focused on giving people better mobile tools to create and share media, Zander and Motorola are apparently more concerned with giving them tools to just consume it. Mobile users aren’t consumers anymore, they’re creators. If Motorola can’t grasp that, its future is bleak.
Update: I should have made it clearer that the ability to play 30 fps video isn’t particularly groundbreaking, as several handsets can already do it — including, as has been pointed out to me, the Motorola Z8, which was announced back at 3GSM in February. So is Zander going to re-announce the Z8 like it’s new, or is he just out of the loop with what the company’s doing?
El Reg’s coverage of Zander’s (or should that be ZNDR?) keynote indicate that he’s a long way from having a clue about Mobile tech.
But, he does appear to grasp the concept that Moto’s luck-lustre phones will continue to struggle against the competition, even if the competition has never released a phone before…
El Reg - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/09/software_2007_zander_keynote/
[…] I’m here in San Francisco today for the UIQ Fast Track developer event (give me a shout if you’re here too), and a Moto VP is giving a talk right now. He’s talking up the Z8, the company’s UIQ handset which was announced at 3GSM a few months back — and looks pretty fantastic. Now, with an eye on tomorrow’s product announcements that MOTOCEO Ed ZNDR mentioned last week, a couple more points on the Z8. First, it will apparently begin shipping mid-June, but more interestingly, the exec says the Z8 isn’t a “one-off” device, and that Motorola has invested too much in the platform to simply create a single product with it. […]