By Relmor Demitrius
Mobile Ad Network AdMob released its monthly report yesterday on cell phone traffic. In March, the Motorola (NYSE:MOT) Droid(TM) received 44% of the Google OS traffic, compared to 43% from HTC. This study accounted for 3 different versions of the operating system. The Google Nexus One(TM) only accounted for 2% of the traffic. With 8,000 new apps debuting in the month of March, upping the total now to 30,000, the popularity in the app world for this smart phone is only increasing. With 2% of the traffic coming from the Google Nexus One, the news we received yesterday from Google is not surprising.
Google (NYSE:GOOG) announced yesterday that they are scrapping their plans to release their smart phone, the Nexus One, to Verizon Wireless. Are they scrapping their plans with Verizon, and their 90 million customer base? Or are they scrapping the Google Nexus altogether? I believe with these new stats coming out from AdMod, the writing on the wall is here for the Google cell phone foray. It appears to be a huge failure. This should bode well for the Motorola Droid and HTC models, if HTC wasn’t currently being sued in two separate lawsuits on patent infringements on its versions of the Google OS smart phones. That leaves Motorola with a chance to dominate the space.
The Google Nexus One problem isn’t the OS, although it does need extensive upgrades in its new version, its the phone. Simply not selling well. Whether its a good phone or a bad phone is irrelevant, if it’s not selling well it really doesn’t matter.
Google can spin this anyway they want, but it will probably mean the death of the Nexus One foray into the cell phone market. This of course is just fine with Motorola. I doubt they were too thrilled when Google tried to hog the press with their own phone, versus marketing and supporting the superior Droid model. Instead of supporting the inventor and once again innovator of the cell phone, the company got greedy and wanted to generate all the money from the OS license to the phone itself. Motorola knew that even a long track record and strong brand name doesn’t spell success in this rough and highly competitive cell phone market. Google now understands this as well. Is the Google image tarnished in regards to hardware? Maybe. But their software is still efficient and user friendly. The speed of the Droid online is also impressive as well, especially linked into the Verizon 3G service.
Is this a bad sign for Google OS driven phones? Or a huge positive to Motorola’s share of that market? Probably more of the latter, and we will look for hints of the former going forward.
Whatever happens, a window of opportunity is approaching Motorola with these new developments. Considering HTC’s future in this space is unknown due to pending lawsuits and weak brand recognition compared to Motorola, I think there is a chance for Motorola to grab some overall market share in the entire cell phone space itself. With the addition of the Backflip to AT&T customers, and other new releases planned in 2010, Motorola is back to being a force in the market they created and with the tool they invented.
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Long MOT
Real nice read Rel and certainly a huge opportunity for Motorola to be back to “being a force in the market they created and with the tool they invented”. Now, lets see if they can follow through?
hmmm sounds good for MOTO!!!!!!!!
Now moto just needs to make a device using a 1ghz qualcom processor or something similar (or faster, asuming it doesnt drain batery), and it needs to be a 2.x version with motoblur. Then they will have a killer on their hand.