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Lenovo Lays Off a Chunk of Its Motorola Smartphone Team
On Friday, Lenovo confirmed layoffs for the Motorola group in Chicago, where the company designs its modular Moto Z smartphones. "In a statement to 9to5Google, Lenovo denied that it was axing 50% of the workforce, as the site had suggested, but didn't provide any further specifics," reports Fast Company. Android Police now reports that 190 people were laid off. A separate report of theirs claims that the company has "completely abandoned plans to launch the successor to last year's Moto X4, the as-yet unannounced Moto X5." Furthermore, "Motorola will be narrowing its focus back to E, G, and Z phones for the time being," reports Android Police. "It's possible the Moto X name could return at some point, but that's looking unlikely in light of this news." The source also says Motorola will be largely discontinuing its efforts to develop all-new, eccentric MotoMods for its Z phone. The likelihood that MotoMods will continue to be sold after 2019 is looking very slim.
I have a generic android phone which I bought online from shanghai. I paid about half the cost of a Motorola in the shop. Its no wonder the big brands are scaling back production.
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Motorola let you root any of their phones. They have a part of their website that gives you an unlock code. Been that way for at least 3 years. Probably more.
Moto has best bang-for-the-buck phones right now. Their G series is really something.
Its really too bad that non-Chinese companies do not release something similar: reasonable performance for reasonable price.
Do you have any idea how many times we have heard "This is the end of Motorola!" over the past decades?
You are welcome on my lawn.
One of the greatest mods just came out, the "Livermorium Slider Keyboard Mod", that's a real keyboard for the Moto Z, and I can't wait to get mine. If you use the phone to write real texts, or remotely administer servers or PCs, or do some of the many other things which get hampered by a virtual keyboard overlaying a large part of the screen, the physical keyboard is a must.
Two completely different use cases. You use a projector where you don't have a big screen.
Yes, the "Hasselblad true zoom", while Hasselblad of course did not do anything except giving their name, is a 10x zoom add-on for a smartphone, and its image quality is quite decent, too. It's for people who want something much more versatile than a usual smartphone camera, something they can always take along with their smartphone, while they don't want to carry a whole extra camera all the time. Plus it is very well built, handles well and seems to be very durable, too.
There are millions of people who do not take games too seriously and therefore play on smartphones – quite a lot of them still might want to use a game controller. Why shouldn't they?
And then there are other mods – several battery-pack add-ons to choose from which don't make the phone too bulky, or really good speakers to clip on (one's from JBL, if I remember correctly).
Even if it's a proprietary connector that, in a sensibly organized world, would have been designed open and for anyone else to use, too, it was a good idea that makes the Moto Z phones some of the most interesting and attractive phones to date, IMHO.
Oh man, I hope this doesn't mark the end of the current lineup of Motorola phones. I don't want to have to go on yet another goose chase after a decent and yet affordable phone. I currently own a Moto G, and it has the benefit of not being outrageously expensive, works "well enough" for everyday use while lasting minimum one day on a single charge, it is not iPhone as I do not want to be locked in with the Apple eco-system (not an Apple-hater, I am writing this on my Macbook Air), and very important to me - after a truly sh##y experience with resource-hogging and annoying proprietary setup of my first Samsung smartphone, I want _the vanilla Android experience_!!! As few "customizations" as possible, and with some reasonably new version of Android. And so far, the latest iteration of the Moto G (I had the last one, which turned out to be underspecced and have some battery problems - not so with the latest one at least yet) has really been the only phone to deliver on all of these.
And probably there also goes my dream of the anticipated Lenovo tablet, which I was hoping would do all these things in tablet format. After giving up on my NVidia Shield Tablet primarily due to extremely poor battery life, I have been looking for a vanilla Android tablet that is reasonably priced - and there were announcements I think spring 2017 that there would "soon" be a new tablet from Lenovo that I thought would deliver on all the above metrics, which still has not emerged. And now I am guessing the whole thing will get canned.
Bah ... why must it be so difficult to find reasonably priced hardware that actually works without a lot of annoying customizations designed to lock you in with the ecosystem of some particular vendor.
Do you have any idea how many times we have heard "This is the end of Motorola!" over the past decades?
And in each case it has turned to be true (I used to work at Moto, so many of my ex-coworkers, all of us nomads that have moved to other pastures many moons ago).
Each time, the once great company morphed itself into an emptier and emptier shelf of its former shelf, daftly re-living the "Groundhog Day" version of Zenos's Paradox.
I left Motorola in 2006 (along with around 200 others) as a business unit was dismantled.
In its last years as a shrinking husk of an grand old-school company with a real research operation, I was able to get maybe 5 PhD signal processing / RF specialists from Motorola Research in the Chicago area, assigned for a few weeks to work on an interesting little project. I got a proof of concept, and they got a proof of capability for specific direct digital synthesis and up/down conversion techniques that were in development and looking for applications.
I had to lobby hard to travel to Bangalore in my last few weeks there, to transfer engineering knowledge to an outsource group, many of whose members were unable to obtain US visas in good time. Apart from a couple of weeks of intestinal distress afterward, that was a very informative life experience.
By the time I had my exit interview, the building was locked, and I was probably still at home within sprinting distance of the toilet. I did the exit interview from mailed paperwork, talking to an HR person at another site. She was so depressed and exhausted from doing this for the other 199 or so, that I had to walk her through the process.
I did a search the other day and found, amusingly, that my patents are now owned by Google (from whom I have never worked).
We need to go beyond Groundhog Day, and draw from Office Space, Falling Down, and from the old Twilight Zone TV series.