Motorola nailed to the wall for the next 2 years

Mr Connected, Om Malik, picked up a post I made about Motorola handsets flying out of Orange stores here in the UK yesterday. He highlighted the rather ‘dismal’ outlook for the handset manufacturer…

Link: GigaOM » Moto, dumping some inventory?

Following a rather weak first quarter earnings report and a dismal outlook, some feared that Motorola was going to start dumping excess inventory and into the market, and start aggressive discounting. Apparently that might have started already.

SMS Text News reports that Orange is doing brisk sales on Moto.

This coverage was followed up by his colleague Katie Fehrenbacher’s post today about the Motorola CEO and his one-trick-RAZR-pony.

For some time I’ve been watching Motorola’s handset releases and just despairing. They’re shit.

The KRZR is just ridiculous. It looks nice, but really, there’s a limit you can stretch the whole RZRZRZKRZR thing. You know that limit was well and truly exceeded years ago when the likes of Samsung are knocking out 5.9 milimetre-thin handsets that look and function fantastically. About a billion times better than your average KRZR.

I despair for all the folk buying up KRZRs and other shitty Motorolas. They’re fine as handsets. Perfectly fine. But consumers are shortly going to want more. A lot more. They’re going to see their geeky and fashionista friends walking around with all-singing-all-dancing N95s, N73s, K800s and an array of hot looking and functioning Samsungs and LGs… and they’re going to very quickly find their bog-standard shite KRZR wanting.

Things aren’t too hot for Sony Ericsson at the moment as witnessed by the dribbling out of the K800 ‘i’. Different keys. Different looking. Yes. Thanks for coming. Where’s your next trick? Come on. Get on with some sodding innovation.

Stick a GPS in it. Improve the PC and Mac integration. Boost the camera quality. Make it work better for consumers. You know. Do something. Innovate. Don’t just ship the usual shit.

These KRZRs and RAZRs still don’t work properly with anything. They’re still handsets. The world has — and is — moving on. My mum is a little bit frustrated that she can’t install stuff on her RAZR. She wants the ShoZu ‘thing’ I have (when I take a picture on my N95, it’s immediately sent via ShoZu to Flickr). Want ShoZu on your KRZR? Piss off. It doesn’t work. Won’t work. Can’t work. Can’t be bothered. Too difficult for developers to bother getting anything to work on a Moto. Want seemless MP3 integration with your PC? Dream on. Want your laptop to connect to the internet via your RAZR? Get a Nokia and it’ll work.

So I’m not happy with Motorola. I haven’t been for a while. I look forward to their next set of innovations. See if they knock out another ZRRRRR thing — another slim-version-of-the-RAZR, I’ll hit the roof. I think, unless they’ve got something ready to pull out their arse R&D department into production soonish, it’s going to be a lonnnnng time ’til I look their way again.