Motorola

Motorola’s Android phone: good but compelling enough?

Motorola has launched the Cliq smartphone, its first Android operating system model and one that offers users a kind of “mashup” launch page called Blur (not much marketing zip) that consolidates social network, email, and IM into a single page.

Motorola has been a major laggard in the smartphone space, and it’s now teaming with T-Mobile for the Cliq launch, since T-Mobile has the longest history with Android phones. There are also some international prospects for Cliq, but the problem is that the gadget doesn’t have any really compelling benefit and thus may not be enough to pull through a lot of additional sales for Motorola.

We think the Android choice is smart. Nobody but Apple, Blackberry and Palm can hope to sustain a developer program on their own these days. The problem is that Motorola has waited so long that it’s going to be incredibly hard to differentiate its announcements from the pack.

4G LTE adoption may depend on smartphone model

The LTE transformation appears to be gaining momentum, even though it still looks like no significant investment will be made until 2010. We believe that a major factor in this is the decision by service providers to adopt a smartphone-pull model for data revenue, a model that relies on the Internet and handsets to drive data growth and shift revenue to data-centric plans.

Unlike some previous walled-garden service plans, the smartphone model needs a lot of users and capacity to create additional revenue, and thus may be best approached with LTE. Too much near-term push on data, one operator tells us, would confront operators with the choice of either staying with 3G and risking an explosion in the number of cells, or forcing the buyers of 3G smartphones to upgrade en masse to 4G.

Femtocell plans are likely a good barometer here; operators have been talking up 4G femtocells and Motorola has now announced it’s focusing its femtocell work there. Our model says that 2011 will be the big year for 4G, which means that it will be important for equipment vendors to both prepare for that and address how to keep infrastructure spending up in the meantime.

Proposed deals verify mobile angst

Regarding the Alcatel-Lucent/NEC deal and the rumored Motorola-Nortel deal, these developments are symptoms of the angst in the mobile infrastructure market, the slowing of investment in infrastructure that is accompanying a lack of convincing growth in ARPU, and concerns about regulatory shifts and voice pricing. The vendors are looking for something to hang their future revenue model on, as well as to reduce costs and pull back their exposure to the mobile market. More of this sort of thing, and other activities related to the overall mobile infrastructure challenges, can be expected through this year and into 2009.