A personal take: Google + Motorola = Good Business

Courtesy of PC World

Almost 2 years ago the words smartphone and myself did not belong in the same sentence. As a matter of fact the concept didn't register as a thought to me until sometime in the fall of 2009 when I decided that I needed to make the transition from feature phone user to smartphone guru. Now mind you fall was not too far off from the Google, Motorola and Verizon Wireless partnership, but for whatever reason I completely forgot about the day that the big three would peak my initial interest in purchasing a smartphone. As September turned to October I would come to decide that I would look into purchasing a Blackberry. Well it didn't happen, the purchase that is and you may or may not wonder why. Well, I'll tell you anyway. It's because RIM did not have anything in the pipeline that would remotely cause a tingle of excitement. At that point even the Blackberry Storm 2 was rumored to be pushed back and rumor eventually turned into reality. Too bad because it only took one commercial to completely steal my attention away from finding a sufficient Blackberry device. That's right, it was the coming of the DROID.

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All month long I looked across the internet for pictures, rumored pictures and release dates. My excitement could not be contained. Yes, I'm a mobile phone geek and I have been one for years, but for some reason smartphones were never apart of my equation. A date was finally announced. 11/6/2009 would be a day that would change the way I view mobile technology forever. Sure there was the iPhone and at first I wanted one, but I could honestly tell you I was not willing to leave Verizon Wireless and their fantastic service for Cingular Wireless re-branded as AT&T Wireless just prior to the iPhone original launch date. As time went on and as more and more people grabbed themselves an iPhone along with a bucket of AT&T service complaints I found that I wanted no part of what I deemed to be a fad. Almost a fashion like fad that made me reject the concept of switching to an iPhone with maximum defiance.

So on launch day I purchased the Motorola DROID. I was won over by the touch screen device with sliding keyboard because I felt I needed a keyboard, but more so I was won over by the "true man's" smartphone. That it was. It could handle a drop without much of a scratch. Cracked and shattered screens? Very hard to come by. Scratched screen? Good luck pulling that off! Gorilla Glass is something to marvel about. Most important of all. It was a capable competitor to the iPhone and it was different. It's the phone that arguably set off the 3rd age of smartphones and I enjoyed it with an appreciation for my changed but much improved organization skills.

My appreciation for Motorola was sky high at the time. They could do no wrong! Because I was such a believer in their products again I decided to take a second go around in August of 2010.

I picked up the mammoth Motorola DROID X. A month or so after the purchase, it became apparent that Motorola had finally become to smart even for their own good. They were luck enough to survive the device sales drought that followed their widely popular Razr phone. However they lost sight of what brought them back to the world of profitability. Good device with very good software installed. Motorola introduced Motoblur or as they would have you call it. Blur, but not really blur wink-wink into the DROID X. The lag introduced to the phone would make most scream. Also introduced was locked boot loaders. Essentially stealing the ability to easily root and custom rom the phone itself. Now most of you don't know or even care what a custom rom or rooting is all about. It's not necessary that you know or care, but it is important that you know this. Motoblur is a OEM/Device Manufacturer software skin made by Motorola and applied on top of plain Android that changes the look, feel and subtle operations of the smartphone device itself. It can change the way a phone loads, to how you retrieve your contacts, to some application integration and to the simplest form such as the way the app launcher loads and how you move to your secondary home screens. Now you may not feel that this matters, but a skin applied on top of Android can be done correctly. HTC does it now with HTC Sense on their phones. They have experience doing this for years with Windows Mobile. They have been in the smartphone game for a very long time. Motorola has no experience in this department and they are definitely not in the software business. The lag Motoblur creates on a device so soon after purchase in unacceptable.

This is why in May of this year I moved on to the HTC Thunderbolt. In comparison to all Motorola smartphones featuring Motoblur, it's no competition. HTC wins that battle hands down.

But a changing of the guard may be upon us. Google needed to be in the business of making devices. Google is a search business which buys any company it needs to buy to put themselves in a market they could not enter on their own. The youtube purchased opened them up for videos. The Android purchase introduced Google to the game of smartphones via software and now the final piece of the puzzle. They enter the game from the device side and considering how far they've come in having direct OEM control in directing the building of the G1, Nexus One and Nexus S, then the skies the limit. The move is good business. It solves a host of problems while opening up others that I will discuss later.

I love HTC and am very fond of their phones, but Motorola can easily put together a better piece of hardware. I recently dropped my HTC Thunderbolt for the first time and the results? Scared edges on all 4 corners and a huge crack on the screen. It still works for now but not the same. Motorola solves that problem. I dropped the original DROID many times without the same visual consequences. I was rooting for Google prior to this. You can bet your last dollar I'm rooting for them even more now.

More to come regarding this deal later today...