Motorola, the pioneering brand known for inventing hand-held Walkie-Talkie and the first cell phones will vanish by this year-end. Motorola COO Rick Osterloh confirmed the news at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016.
It's been a little over one year since Lenovo acquired Motorola from Google, and now, it has been learnt that the parent company will merge both the smartphone brands and sell them under Lenovo's name.
On the bright side, Lenovo has decided to continue to make Moto X, G series phones along with the company's proprietary Vibe series.
"We'll slowly phase out Motorola and focus on Moto," Rick Osterloh said in an exclusive interview with CNET.
It has been learnt that the Moto series will not have any change in design or logo. It will bear the iconic M batwing engraving, but the brand will be replaced by blue hued Lenovo insignia.
Brief history of Motorola:
Motorola brand was first registered in 1930 by parent company Galvin Manufacturing Corporation to sell car radios.
Since then, the firm made huge stride in radio and telecommunication field and was instrumental in bringing out hand-held AM SCR-536 radio, a vital tool for communication between the US and its allies during World War 2.
For those unaware, Neil Armstrong -- the first man to walk on moon -- used 'Motorola transceiver' to say the iconic phrase: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
Some of the world's first device categories to come out of Motorola include Walkie-Talkie, cell-phone DynaTAC8000X (world's first commercial hand-held phone), microprocessor (8-bit MC6800) used for video-game consoles, PC and smart-devices.
Despite Motorola Razor series flip-phone's huge success, the company's dominance began to taper after the arrival of Apple and Samsung in late 2000.
In 2008, Motorola board members, after incurring huge losses, decided to split the company in two parts -- Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility. Due to recession at the time, the split was delayed and it was officially completed in 2011.
Later that year, Google announced to take over Motorola Mobility in a $12.9 billion deal and after getting approval from regulator in the US and Europe, the transaction was finished in 2012.
In 2014, a few months after the company rolled out the first Google-Motorola phone Moto X, the search engine giant announced Lenovo will take over the Motorola Mobility in a $2.9 billion deal.
Read more: Lenovo Completes Acquisition Formalities of Motorola from Google
The fading away of the Motorola brand was inevitable as Lenovo bought it as part of a strategy to expand th Chinese company's reach in the western smartphone markets. In 2014, Lenovo brand was synonymous with laptops and PCs, nobody in the west knew of the company's phone business. Back then, it was limited to Asian markets.
Now, Lenovo is officially taking steps to bring Vibe series phones in the US, but it is not likely to happen in 2016, said Osterloh.
