BARCENA—Don’t cry for Motorola. The company continues to make solid gear, it’s finally starting to feel at home within the novo product family. At least that’s the message from Osterloh, Motorola’s president.
Osterloh spoke at a Mobile rld Congress press event on dnesday. The company hosted a similar sit-down at last year’s show, this year Osterloh seemed more optimistic as Motorola embraces its future under novo’s wing. Osterloh didn’t drop any bombshells, but here are some key excerpts from his chat.
On the novo Motorola partnership
“Motorola is organized as a mobile business group within novo. ’re a fully intact business much like we were with . Strategically, we’re organized this way to maximize flexibility, we’re sharing our supply chain function, which is a source of huge leverage. So we’ll do platforming joint procurement stuff like that [while taking advantage of] novo’s amazing manufacturing prowess.”
On leveraging the novo relationship in emerging markets
“In general, our product portfolio is a little more higher-priced than novo’s. There’s a couple of price points where we overlap, Moto E starts that, but novo’s products are generally positioned as very thin high-performing, while ours are about the user experience, fast software upgrades, pure Android, some value added features.”
On the growth of Moto E beyond emerging markets
“The Moto E is an enormous product for us in terms of volume. don’t compete on price. Fundamentally, we offer great value, especially when you compare the products to Apple, Samsung, or other marketshare leaders. also have things that are typically found in high-tier phones in the Moto E. It has 3G 4G options, a quad-core processor, the screen is 4.5-inches. It also has lipop, which is extremely rare in this tier, it has the same user experience features that were first introduced on the Moto X.”
On whether Motorola will still provide timely updates
“Motorola technically issues the upgrades directly—not through . So, software updates won’t change.”
On the Moto 360 its overall performance
“The numbers sort of look a lot like early days of smartphones in numbers, but we’re very committed to Android ar—it’s in its infancy, but it’s continuously improving.”
On wearables competition
“’re doing a few things we think are interesting. For instance, we’re investing in software, like Moto Body, we’re going to keep driving upgrades to that functionality. Then, we introduced Moto Maker on the Moto 360. think there’s no area where Moto Maker is more interesting than on wearables—it’s just the perfect spot for it. ople like different watch styles different watch faces.”
On cramming stalone E into a smartwatch
“The driving element behind our implementation is design, style, size. At the moment, adding that kind of tech makes it so that the watch becomes uninteresting again. It starts to approach smartphone territory.”
