Motorola Snaps Up Sendo's R&D
1st
July 2005
Britain's only mobile phone manufacturer, Sendo,
has gone into administration (which essentially means
that it has ceased trading). Sendo is best known for
low-cost handsets tailored to specific carrier's needs
(such as the SV663)
and also high-end Symbian smartphones such as the Sendo
X2.
Almost immediately though, Motorola have stepped
in and bought up Sendo's intellectual property and research
and development facilities, which comprises of 200+
employees and nearly 100 patents filed or pending, which
basically leaves the administrators with the physical
assets of Sendo only, including their stock of handsets.
Motorola isn't really buying Sendo as a going concern,
nor it appears is it taking Sendo's licence for Symbian
Series 60 with it (Motorola uses the UIQ variant of
Symbian) which puts the future of the excellent Sendo
X and X2 handsets in doubt. Besides, despite Sendo
shipping an impressive 5 million handsets annually,
Motorola's shipments are likely to be well over 100
million this year.
The real advantage for Motorola is that Sendo have
a very good reputation for innovation and delivering
customised handsets quickly. Admittedly, the Sendo X
was horribly late, but to their credit Sendo are very
capable at making quite major hardware and software
modifications for their cheaper handsets in an impressively
short time. This is something that Motorola badly need
as their track record at getting products to market
at the moment is very poor, and their idea of customising
handsets seems to extend pretty much only as far as
putting on a different shell and coming up with a slightly
different model number (i.e. the Motorola V500 series).
We'll be interested to see what the ex-Sendo team
can achieve with proper funding and resources though,
and what Motorola can do with the intellectual property
that Sendo really never managed to exploit properly
(such as some interesting display technologies on recently
announced handsets).
For gadget freaks this is both bad news and good
news. With the Sendo X and X2, the company certainly
caused a bit of a stir and proved that it's not just
big companies that can be innovative, and Sendo have
always been an important innovator in smartphones (they
made a major contribution to Microsoft's platform too
before the companies fell out). However, the acquisition
does mean that we could see some much more interesting
handsets coming out of Motorola in 2006, a company that's
been plagued with poorly performing products and vapourware
for a little while now.
At Mobile Gazette we have always liked Sendo and
their products, so this state of affairs is a little
sad. Farewell then Sendo.. and Mobile Gazette wishes
all Sendo employees good luck.
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