Mobile Entertainment

In 2007, it slipped from a comfortable second in the global handset stakes to third place behind Samsung. Its share fell from 21 per cent to 14 per cent.

Actually, a split is not so drastic in itself. Think about it, Sony Ericsson is the result of a JV, Nokia parcelled off its network business to Siemens and Moto itself offloaded its processor unit to Freescale Semiconductor. I suppose the difference here is that the action was taken so defensively, with big shareholders pressing for some radical repair work.

But, what a rapid and visible fall from grace. Cast your mind back to the introduction of the Razr and the sheer sexiness of that machine-tooled keypad. The slimness of the thing. It was hard not to be seduced. But the Razr got little support from the rest of the range. Remember the Rokr? It has almost been forgotten now, but what a debacle it was – a fat, ugly device that limited the number of iTunes tracks you could load and didn’t offer the OTA option that would have made it a true breakthrough.

Then there was the Pebl, which I always thought was a cute-looking clamshell, but it never caught the public imagination. And the Krzr? I had a trial; it was awful. So when the Razr finally lost its battleship grey lustre, there was little else to sustain the company.

Moto’s position in the content stakes inevitably suffered too. I well remember how different things were in the pre-java days, when the firm was amazingly aggressive in the nascent entertainment sector. It even published early WAP and SMS versions of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

And when Java came along, developers loved making games for the Razr. More recently, it launched a successful mobile music store in China and formed some interesting strategic partnerships with the likes of Shozu, Kodak, Napster, Sky and Universal.

However, the company lacked a headline grabbing catch-all initiative to compete with Nokia’s Ovi or Sony Ericsson’s Play Now.

The devices haven’t helped. When Moto launched its Z8, which comprised a full version of the movie The Bourne Identity, it described it as a ‘Media Monster’. Fair enough, the device packed loads of content features. But it just couldn't deliver the design élan to compete with Nseries, Walkman or Ultra.

Certainly this is the end of chapter one for Moto. But who knows what the future holds? We don’t even know what the division will be called, although the brand is surely more important for handsets than it is for the broadband unit. There remains the possibility of a buy-out too.

Last week the Indian consumer electronics giant Videocon Group expressed an interest. I like the idea of a Motorola Rajr.