Lenovo hopes to say Hello Moto to smartphone cash

A year after buying Motorola, Lenovo is looking to sell a lot of its once highly popular phones. The Chinese company expects the brand to account for 40 per cent of the smartphones it sells next year. Combined Motorola and Lenovo sales of smartphones last year were 85 million. This would make it the third-largest smartphone …

[Anonymous Coward]

Lenovo has the cash, and they've bought in the design skills

They should make Motorola work well for them.

[Stuart 22]

Differentiators

Market leaders need 'em. Let's hope Lenovo adopt and extend Moto's decision to providing Vanilla Android and amongst the first to update it.

Much more attractive than Sammie's bloated blast of the past.

[Grumpy Fellow]

A ThinkPad Phone might make sense

There was a rumor a while back of a Think-brand phone out of this. I have to say, if they built one I would find it hard to resist. As long as the phone was matte black with a ThinkPad logo, of course. I'm pretty happy with how Lenovo has held up the quality of the ThinkPad line and they still support the old ones well. Just a week or so ago I had to download Windows 95 drivers so I could run some DOS stuff on an ancient ThinkPad and all the drivers were still available from them. That's long term support!

[Medixstiff]

I hope they do well, we use ThinkPad's exclusively at work - after a vanilla Win7 install to remove all the extra junk most manufacturers install - mum has a Yoga tablet and it's a nice bit of kit, so I expect their phones to be excellent too, if they do have a vanilla install like the Nexus, I'll be getting rid of the S3 and Samsung's annoying Samsung account messages quick smart.

[Anonymous Coward]

"if they do have a vanilla install"

Maybe to start with. Seems to me that as soon as a company starts getting pretensions, and chasing higher margins, then they start seeing a "need" to differentiate themselves, and if you're a marketing dweeb, that means putting a custom skin on Android, and after that filling the phone with duplicate apps.

Which means that the Lenovo branded handsets stand a low chance of being bloat free, but the newly aspirational Moto brand will stand no such chance, and will soon be cruft central.