Motorola acts to increase rate of phone innovation
Motorola has finally acted to improve its mobile phone's features and bring them to market more quickly, by buying BenQ Mobile's Danish R&D centre. The 250 BenQ engineers will work for Motorola in the new rebranded centre, which will become a product development centre for Motorola.
Motorola have been criticized recently for bringing out 'new' phones that are just existing phones (principally the RAZR and PEBL) with slightly different features, or which simply have a different paint job. Pundits have speculated that Motorola may be losing the mobile phone-feature arms race, unable to release new features as fast as its more nimble rivals, and not having anhything in its armoury to continue the success of the RAZR.
Now, it seems, Motorola is aiming to plug the gap with its new purchase. "This acquisition will enhance Motorola's capabilities in mobile phone development, software application development and antenna technology,” said Ron Garriques, president of Motorola Mobile Devices, in a statement.
Mind you, BenQ also thinks its going to speed up its product innovations by offloading the centre! “By offloading complexity in R&D, we will be able to more quickly develop new handsets and to launch products earlier in the competitive handset market,” said Clemens Joos, chief executive officer of BenQ Mobile, in the same statement. And it might be right, too, as BenQ acquired an execllent R&D centre from Siemens when it bought out Siemens' mobile phone division to create BenQ-Siemens. This new R&D arm has already released some amazing new concept prototype phones.
So it seems BenQ gets to speed up its product releases by off-loading the R&D centre that Motorola buys to do the same thing! Strange thing, this mobile phone world!
[Source: EETimes]
