Can Android Save Motorola?

Motorola (MOT), which is recruiting as many as 350 people to work on Android phones, is gearing up to make its first one:the Android Social Smart Phone. Last week, Android Guys spotted a job posting for the project, and now BusinessWeek has more details, including a mention of the Motorola job posting pictured at left on Monster (MNST) looking for an Android application developer. If the people pictured in the ad to represent Motorola employees are any indication, embarrassing dance moves are a plus, but not required.

According to BusinessWeek, Motorola is putting $50 million into its Android project, which is being run by a team from Good Technology, a mobile e-mail company that Motorola bought in 2006. The first phone won’t come out until the second quarter of next year, it will have a touch screen like the iPhone and a slide-out keyboard like the HTC T-Mobile G1 launching on Wednesday, but will look more like the Motorola Krave. It is also expected to be cheaper than the G1’s $180 price.

But how will it tie into existing social networks? Already, the G1 imports your contacts from Gmail into the phone. It wouldn’t be too hard for the Motorola Android to import your friends’ list from Facebook or MySpace directly into the phone’s address book, and let you IM them and see their status updates and activity streams on your phone. Kind of like the Facebook app on the iPhone lets you do already, except that you wouldn’t necessarily need to launch a separate app.

Is the idea of a Facebook phone or a MySpace phone interesting enough in and of itself for people to want to buy it? And, more importantly, can Android save Motorola?

Original post

Comments

[sgmsg:]

No. Android is an OS. Motorola can't be different.

Do you find a big different between Dell, HP or a noname PC?

No It's all the same taste.

If you want more flavour you buy a Mac.

2008 Oct 20 11:10 PM

[KenC:]

Wow, that's an embarassing job posting.

2008 Oct 21 12:48 AM

[mollytjm:]

there's undoubtedly room for more than one smartphone out there...Android is a cool name, but it's kind of slow. innovation is the name of the game in the tech world... so far everyone is playing catch up with the iphone. Motorola isn't doomed at the moment, but they better spend more on R&D because you can bet that Apple is.

2008 Oct 21 10:10 AM

[Winst:]

Why are so many hung up on Apple and their 10M phones? RIM's 40M phones is a lot more of a competitor, especially with the number of different phones they are releasing.

Apple had better be spending money on R&D, hopefully to improve the call quality. How many people are getting iPhones but keeping a second phone for phones calls because the call quality just isn't good enough?

2008 Oct 21 11:08 AM

[TinyTim:]

Can Android Save Motorola?

uhh, no.

fuggetaboutem

2008 Oct 21 05:09 PM