Motorola hedges its bets with Google

The glamor days of Motorola ended some four to five years ago, soon after the firm’s tremendous success with its Razr series and the V3.
Ranked second in terms of worldwide market share, Motorola has inspired its rivals to come up with their own slim designs.
Even Apple partnered with Motorola several years ago to build what can only be described as the initial draft of an iPhone, the Motorola E1 which was the first mobile phone to be fully integrated with iTunes.
Motorola shares, however, have seen a steady decline over the years, with the firm now finding itself way behind the likes of Samsung, Sony Ericson and Apple.
As a result, Motorola has also had to take the strategic decision to abandon the development of its own OS, choosing to add a layer on top of Google’s Android platform (MotoBlur) instead for its smartphones.
Indeed, the sheer popularity of Android along with marketing boosts from both Google and Verizon helped Motorola’s Droid take second place for the most popular smartphone in the US after Apple’s iPhone.
Now, after a concerted push into the Asian market and the perceived appeal of the social UI MotoBlur, Motorola once again appears to be on the right track.
Motorola’s allegiance to Google, however, has come into question recently, especially concerning the firms deals with Skyhook Wireless and Yahoo.
Motorola announced last week it would be using Skyhook’s location positioning and context offerings on its smartphones instead of Google’s native location services.
Earlier in the year, Motorola also launched the Android based Backflip with AT&T sporting Yahoo as its default mobile search engine instead of Google’s search.
Motorola’s reasoning behind this is supposedly to differentiate its handsets from other Android based smartphones, but the plot thickens.
Possibly the most puzzling move in the sequence is Motorola’s recent purchase of mobile OS company Azingo which already has its own linux-based OS, Azingo Mobile 2.0.
Apparently the OS is already kitted out with its own Webkit-based browser, a web runtime, Flash runtime, and full developer tools.
It all seems a bit odd if Motorola still intends to push forward with Android, looking rather more as if Motorola plans to develop its own OS, instead. Or perhaps the firm is just planning on integrating the firm’s engineers with its MotoBlur team to keep building on top of Android.
If Motorola is thinking of building its own OS, however, it should proceed with extreme caution. After all, if there’s one thing the industry has learned lately it’s a lesson from HP buying Palm.