Posted by Will Stabley on Jul 13, 2013 in News, Tech |
Moto X is the first phone Motorola has launched worth paying attention to in several years, and Google wants to make sure you pay attention by spending $500 million on marketing the new Android based smartphone. But the real challenge isn’t about raising brand awareness. It’s about making the Motorola brand cool again. One can forgive Google for not having bothered to do much with Motorola Mobility in the two years since it acquired the company, as the transaction happened merely for patent reasons. But with Google now left owning one of its own Android hardware partners, the Moto X is Google’s way of trying to milk the acquisition for revenue. The difficulty: this isn’t 1999 or even 2004, and the Motorola brand is overwhelmingly uncool.
Android licensing saved Motorola from extinction, but it was never more than an also-ran brand within the Android platform, as competitors like Samsung swallowed up the bulk of the platform’s sales. But like an arranged marriage still intact after the original arrangement has come and gone, Google has decided to push the Motorola brand to the forefront of the Android platform after all. The X phone was a longtime in-house Google project layered in secrecy for years. But now Google is giving the phone to Motorola and giving the Moto X a chance to bring Motorola back into mainstream relevance.
Then again Google still has its own in-house Nexus brand of Android phones which, despite never having been a sales leader, are among the most respected of Android hardware. That makes the Moto X phone to some extent merely Google hedging its bets by giving Motorola a much hyped new phone to try its hand with even while prepping the next Nexus phone under the Google brand.
Will Stabley is the Founder and Senior Editor of Stabley Times.
Moto X is the first phone Motorola has launched worth paying attention to in several years, and Google wants to make sure you pay attention by spending $500 million on marketing the new Android based smartphone. But the real challenge isn’t about raising brand awareness. It’s about making the Motorola brand cool again. One can forgive Google for not having bothered to do much with Motorola Mobility in the two years since it acquired the company, as the transaction happened merely for patent reasons. But with Google now left owning one of its own Android hardware partners, the Moto X is Google’s way of trying to milk the acquisition for revenue. The difficulty: this isn’t 1999 or even 2004, and the Motorola brand is overwhelmingly uncool.
Android licensing saved Motorola from extinction, but it was never more than an also-ran brand within the Android platform, as competitors like Samsung swallowed up the bulk of the platform’s sales. But like an arranged marriage still intact after the original arrangement has come and gone, Google has decided to push the Motorola brand to the forefront of the Android platform after all. The X phone was a longtime in-house Google project layered in secrecy for years. But now Google is giving the phone to Motorola and giving the Moto X a chance to bring Motorola back into mainstream relevance.
Then again Google still has its own in-house Nexus brand of Android phones which, despite never having been a sales leader, are among the most respected of Android hardware. That makes the Moto X phone to some extent merely Google hedging its bets by giving Motorola a much hyped new phone to try its hand with even while prepping the next Nexus phone under the Google brand.
Will Stabley is the Founder and Senior Editor of Stabley Times.