Motorola May Ditch Android, Revive ARM Partnership

siliconbits writes "It looks as if Motorola Mobility could be mulling plans to build an alternative to Google's mobile platform. Several independent sources have confirmed that the mobile phone company is working on a web-based mobile operating system to, as one observer put it, have more control on its own destiny. There's another piece in that puzzle; Motorola Mobility could take even more ownership of its destiny by reviving its ARM license as it depends at the moment on TI and Nvidia to provide the SoCs that power its products; Motorola did produce ARM systems-on-chips in the past."

They did?

[TheRaven64]

Motorola did produce ARM systems-on-chips in the past

I thought that Freescale, the company formerly known as Motorola, made ARM SoCs (and still does, by the way). Zombie Motorola - the bit left after they sold off or spun out all of the interesting bits of the company - never did.

Re:Prediction

[antifoidulus]

Yeah, you should have sold MOT a while ago. They were the ones who thought they could outsource all designing, manufacturing, and support out to the lowest bidder(almost always in the 3rd world), and just have management sit back and collect massive rewards. As a result their phones stagnated while the rest of the industry who was more nimble(and probably had less management overhead) sped ahead. THey have been unable to ever get back into the game of actually designing products people want and as a result I don't think they have a very bright future.

Re:Either/Or

[AlienIntelligence]

Android has also been losing it's mojo, and is getting legal threats from everywhere.

If by everywhere, you mean, its competition... yeah... what else is new?
[ http://www.itworld.com/open-source/140916/android-sued-microsoft-not-linux [itworld.com] ]
And Android, ie, Google isn't being sued, only companies that are involved
with it. Typical intimidation tactics.

Furthermore... if Google finds there to be any merit and since they aren't
being sued (yet), they simply can change whatever is the issue, or license
it... throw brain cells or money at it and it will go away. Android won't go
away... but the lawsuits eventually will.

Lastly... it's piddly things like this:
Patent # 5,778,372 (July 7, 1998): "Getting remote deployment and management of an electronic document with embedded images." Patent # 6,339,780 (January 15, 2002): "Status of loading in a hypermedia browser having a limited display area on screen."
Patent # 5,889,522 (March 30, 1999): "A system that provides controls to the derived windows."
Patent # 6,891,551 (May 10, 2005): "Management selection in editing electronic documents."

...that will get the snip of a few lines of code and problem is gone.

-AI

Re:Either/Or

[Anonymous Coward]

As a dev that works on iOS and Android apps, they are entirely correct... I can ensure much easier a uniform and high-quality experience for my apps on iOS than on an arbitrary Android device.

That's great for you as a developer. As a user, I find that running $ARBITRARY_CROSS_PLATFORM_APP on my Droid is an overall superior experience despite the fact that incompetent devs like yourself are unable to get your specific fart app to look and work equally as well on both. You see, I like a hardware keyboard. I like having unobtrusive notifications. I like having RemoteView (oops, I let something slip there), i.e., widgets on my home screens. So, despite Apple's opinion on the subjective "user experience" of iOS vs. Android model, I will have the final say. And I say, that for me, Android is better.