Motorola happy with Android, promises smoother upgrades

February 15, 2011 By Geoff Duncan

Motorola says its proud to be the only 100 percent Android phone maker, and promises Android updates will get smoother going forward.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a Motorola executive has indicated that while Motorola didn’t start off intending to built its entire mobile product line around Android, the company is satisfied with the way things have worked out, and promises that Android upgrades will be smoother for its customers going forward.

Speaking with IDG News, Motorola’s corporate VP of software and services product management Christy Wyatt indicated the company is changing its process for upgrading Android phones, and building the upgrade process on its own Motoblur software. Wyatt described Motorola’s management of Android upgrades to date as a humbling experience, but noted that the company often has to manage multiple customizations for different handsets in different regions even within a single country—and if an update needs to go to 40 countries, that’s several hundred upgrade scenarios that have to be independently tested and verified against a varying field of requirements and regulatory frameworks. Wyatt indicated that Motorola believes it will do a better job rolling out updates to Android 3.0 “Gingerbread” than it did for Android’s “Froyo” and “Eclair” versions.

A recent survey of Android 2.2 updates available for mobile devices painted a fairly bleak picture, with Motorola making upgrades available only for a small percentage of its Android handsets in the U.S. market by the end of 2010. The company has also given up on upgrading Android for some handsets, like its Cliq XT. However, Motorola’a Android upgrade performance was beaten only by HTC: the rest of the market lagged even further behind.

Although as of late 2010 Motorola and Microsoft were still considering working on Windows Phone 7 devices—despite a series of patent infringement suits looming between the companies—Wyatt indicated that Motorola is currently comfortable placing all its chips in the Android camp. The company wouldn’t rule out embracing other platforms in the future, but Wyatt noted delays getting Windows Phone 7 out the door led the company to pursue Android exclusively in order to more aggressively get into the modern smartphone market. And, of course, Microsoft has now entered into a broad pact with Nokia regarding Windows Phone 7, which may leave other OEMs like Samsung, LG, Sharp, and HTC wondering where they now stand in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

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Evren Yurtesen at 10:22pm 16th February 2011 I am sorry to say that Motorola is once more full of BS. They released NO updates in any region within or between countries for their Android phones to Froyo for example. They only upgraded 2 phone models only in USA from all of their models. See for proof: https://supportforums.motorola.com/community/mana... Just stay away from Motorola, they are making empty promises over and over. Have a google search for MotoFail to see that masses are unhappy with Motorola. Motorola tried to sell their mobile phones division which was going down and couldnt even manage that. In the end, they divided the company in two so the Mobility division can die off without pulling the whole company down! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Finances Not to mention, Motorola is closing down their business already. They used to have localized sites in Europe, like Finnish site etc. Now they reduced it to for example Motorola Nordic site. If you go to Nordic site, you will see that they didnt even bother updating it. They still show the old Milestone I phone there. Not to mention, the only Android phone in that site is that... Have a look: http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/NN-EN/Home Do you really think that if Motorola is so weak that it cant even manage updating their own web pages, they will be able to provide any updates to their phones? Especially considering the pages are immensely similar in each area so they could just copy/paste to able to update them easily! If you buy a Motorola device, it is likely that: 1- You will not receive any Android updates. 2- The chances are Motorola will die on you and you will be owner of an antique from non-existent manufacturer. 3- If you happen to have problems with your phone, for example spontaneous reboots etc. you can forget about receiving bugfixes for them. 4- Since Motorola drops support so quickly from phones, after 6 months all your money you payed will turn into ashes and you will end up with a phone which is an unsupported brick. 5- Since Motorola encrypts/locks bootloader and kernel, you wont be able to apply new Android versions yourself either.