Motorola Solutions has made a bid to acquire ruggedized mobile device manufacturer Psion for approximately £128m ($200m). The firm, which is the business remaining after Google acquired its handset business, Motorola Mobility, said it wanted to acquire Psion to strengthen its mobile-computing portfolio with ruggedized handheld products and vehicle-mount terminals.
Intel has used consumer gadget show CES as a platform to declare its arrival to the smartphone market, announcing a multi-year deal with handset maker Motorola Mobility and unveiling a Lenovo handset based on its new Atom processor platform. However, disrupting the current state of the market could prove to be a struggle for the firm, suggests one analyst.
Apple faces the prospect of having its iPad and iPhone devices banned in Germany, just months after securing a ban on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the country with a similar ruling.
The ongoing patent disputes between Apple and Google and its Android partners is killing innovation, according to Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.
Taiwanese handset vendor HTC has previewed two Windows Phone 7 smartphones to consumers across Europe, ahead of the products’ commercial release in October. The Titan and Radar handsets are the first from HTC to run the latest version of WP7, dubbed Mango.
While Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s handset business brings potentially rich rewards in terms of intellectual property, the search firm must be careful to keep its new employees at a respectable distance, industry analysts have warned.
Web giant Google has agreed to acquire handset vendor Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn. “The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem,” Google said.
Nokia Siemens Networks’ search for a willing buyer for a stake in the ailing JV appears to have staggered to a halt, with reports emerging that Nokia and Siemens have agreed to rather invest more of their own cash in an effort to revive the partnership’s fortunes. Reports in the Wall Street Journal suggest that plans to sell a controlling stake in the venture to a consortium including private equity investors were about to fall through, with Reuters quoting telecoms analyst Earl Lum as saying that “Any potential investor would need to see some light at the end of the tunnel with regard to profitability for NSN.”
As Android’s march towards mobile OS domination appears to continue unchecked, device manufacturers are joining the scrum to differentiate themselves from the competition. HTC has joined the ranks of manufacturers increasingly looking to pull in the developers to create device-specific apps, announcing a dev-friendly programme to be launched in parallel with an SDK for its Sense user interface.
Fresh from its recently completed acquisition of Motorola, Nokia Siemens Networks has announced technology that will connect existing Motorola GSM base stations to NSN’s Flexi Base Station Controller, giving them a path to 3G and LTE services.
Fresh from its most recent bout of litigation against Motorola, Huawei has announced that it is suing ZTE for patent infringement. The world’s second biggest kit maker has revealed that it is to file suits against its rival in France, Germany and Hungary over what it claims are patent and trademark infringements relating to data card and LTE technologies. In addition, Huawei alleges that ZTE used one of its registered trademarks illegally on some of its data card products.
Motorola Mobility is rumoured to be working on its own mobile operating system based on web technologies such as HTML5, which would make it easier for developers to port Android and Apple applications to its devices.
Nokia Siemens Networks is rumoured to be seeking a renegotiation the terms of its bid to acquire Motorola’s wireless network assets. The planned deal, valued at $1.2bn, has been moving at a glacial pace since its inception in July last year, thanks largely to the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Bureau’s (MOFCOM) reluctance to approve it.
Nokia Siemens Networks has said that its planned acquisition of Motorola’s wireless infrastructure assets will not now complete in the first quarter of this year, as it had previously predicted. The deal had already been pushed back from the fourth quarter of 2010 and NSN is now offering “no further guidance” on when it may be finalised, stressing only that it remains committed to the acquisition.
China Unicom has announced the development of its own smartphone operating system built on a Linux core. The ‘Wophone’ OS, which reports claim will not be based on Android, will run on a new brand of devices which, it is hoped, will help China Unicom expand its handset offering in order to grow demand for its 3G services.
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