Lenovo Completes Motorola Mobility Purchase

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• evilspoons - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  I really hope they do a good job of this. They managed to make good Thinkpads for a while... this year's models are real stinkers (W540 etc), but hopefully they'll bounce back next year.

• TheLogicBringer - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  I thought the W540 was fairly well received.. high quality display, excellent keyboard..

• evilspoons - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  My main issues with the W540 is that most of the things I think are wrong with it are basically regressions compared to the W530.
  
  Pros vs W530:
  -seriously awesome screen
  
  Cons vs W530:
  -terrible touchpad (everyone complains about it in reviews, the physical buttons are gone, etc)
  -keyboard crams numpad in for some reason, forcing typing area off-center (WHYYY)
  -M.2 slots (YAY!) not widely-available size (WTF!)
  -internal SATA drives in proprietary mounting frame you can't buy yourself
  -ditches all accessory compatibility with the few W530s we have here at work

• josue16 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

  The ThinkPad line has been going downhill for years now since Lenovo took over. This year's ThinkPads has the largest drop in quality and features than any year before it. Worse keyboards, removal of physical trackpoint buttons, soldered non-replaceable RAM, lowered max RAM capacity, use of slower CPUs, more notebooks being shipped with defects, far less rugged, etc.

• Roland00Address - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  Do we know how many 1st Moto X 1st gen are sold? I ask for the Moto X had a $500 million dollar marketing fund. I wonder how much more devices would be sold if it was released as a $400 phone initially (free after contract) instead of a $575 phone which was $199 after contract. If you lowered the marketing fund to $240 million instead of $500 million you can sell 1.5 million phones at $400 and make the same profit if you sold 1.5 million less phones at $575.

• jjj - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  "notably just a fraction of the price that Google purchased the complete Motorola for back in 2012."
  That's a very misleading statement. Google kept patents, the cash situation is slightly different, Google sold the set top box business and the manufacturing facilities so what Lenovo bought and what Google bought are 2 very different things.
  That aside , Lenovo is going Xiaomi in China next year, creating a new brand that sells online and that's a huge move, we'll see how that impacts the Moto brand and if they'll be forced to expand that strategy worldwide. They are also launching a Moto tab soon and hopefully expanding both brands to more markets. As for costs, they should be able to save plenty once they fully merge and their volumes are growing fast. Xiaomi and Lenovo are the most likely to overtake Apple in units maybe as soon as 2016. Lenovo had a soft Q3 in phones on China being a bit soft because of lower carrier subs and delays for the new Mediatek chips but they'll rebound soon and with Moto they could get to some 150 mil units next year to somewhat double 2014 sales - ofc best case scenario but doable. Huawei might have shifted it's strategy too, they launched a few models in India at China pricing and now the Honor 6 in Europe at 300 (more or less) euros so they might be getting aggressive and could compete with Lenovo and Xiaomi.for huge share gains. Samsung doesn't seem ready to do what it has to do , Apple will never half it's prices, LG isn't feeling the pressure yet (but they will starting with this quarter) and everybody else from the old guard is losing relevance (HTC, Sony, Nokia).

• melgross - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  Well, Motorola lost over $1 billion during the time Google owned them. When you also add in the hundreds of millions Google spent on integrating the companies, something they never finished, it kind of evens out. They only got a bit more than a billion for the set top division.
  
  The patents, ha! What a lump of worthless paper that turned out to be.

• Wolfpup - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  This is such a shame. Motorola was always my go-to brand (along with Nokia, but now I've bought my last Motorola :-/

• grahaman27 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

  I dont understand how this could possibly be a shame, Motorola has a brighter future than ever.
  They have a company backing them with plenty of money and actually cares about their success (unlike google). This can only be good.

• deskjob - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

  I feel the same :( I used to use nothing but motorola phones back during the dumb phone era, as they just had superior radios which mattered more to me than anything else in a phone. With the transition to smartphones, I've always been intrigued by the Maxx series with the huge battery approach. Too bad the camera is always iffy. And now I guess no more Moto for me with its Chinese overlords. Sadness.
  
  Same with Lenovo and the PC business. To be fair, I've only been mildly interested in Thinkpads in the past, but I absolutely lost all interest when it became Lenovo.