Motorola knows what it’s like to be on top of the Chinese handset market. But when competitors came out of the woodwork with full touchscreens and tons of apps, it found itself playing catch up to the likes of RIM and Apple.
But as Enterprise Mobile Today reports, Motorola’s latest smartphones offer the best of both worlds for Chinese consumers who like to use the stylus for their characters without sacrificing horsepower and application variety.
The MT810, XT806 and A1680 models vary in price up to $740, or 5,000 yuan, without a contract.
Motorola this year has now introduced a total of 11 Android-based mobile devices in China and, according to market research firm Analysys International, ranked third behind Nokia (26.7 percent) and Samsung (17.9 percent) with 13.6 percent of the Chinese smartphone market in the second quarter.
Handset manufacturer Motorola is hoping to parlay the growing popularity of Google’s Android mobile operating system with its established Ming brand to jumpstart sales of its smartphones in China and regain prominence in a market it once dominated.
Motorola (NYSE: MOT), which got the jump on its competitors back in 2006 when it was the first to introduce handsets that let users input Chinese characters using a stylus on a touch screen, has seen its once-dominant share of the Chinese handset market eroded by the iPhone, the BlackBerry and a number of other mobile devices that were quick to copycat its technology.
This week, Motorola struck back with release of three new handsets (one for each of China’s state-run mobile networks) that offer a number of must-have features including high-definition video cameras, full touchscreens, the familiar transparent “flip” design and, most important, run the Android 2.1 mobile OS (upgradeable to Android 2.2 later this year).