Click to enlarge |
The last year has not been kind to tech giant Lenovo and its Motorola subsidiary. The PC business, which Lenovo dominates, is in decline, and the smartphone business, which Lenovo has long dreamed of dominating, has stalled.
But Lenovo has fared worse than its smartphone peers: as global sales have stopped growing, Lenovo’s have fallen off a cliff. And so have the company’s shares, which have lost more than two-thirds of their value from their peak.
Click to enlarge |
But Lenovo’s CEO Yuanqing Yang believes sunnier days are ahead.
“We have already hit the bottom, last quarter,” Yang told Fortune Magazine recently, “We cannot be worse.”
The road to recovery has started.
The company is also introducing Moto Mods, a platform for slick modules that snap on to the Moto Z phones, dramatically extending their capabilities and turning them into new kinds of devices.
“I think this product will completely change the industry,” an excited Yang tells me, standing over a smattering of mods. They include a JBL speaker that turns the Moto Z into a powerful stereo system; a projector that allows users to beam videos and photos onto a wall, delivering an instant up-to-70-inch viewing experience; and an assortment of batteries and stylish backings. Not on display yet: a module that turns the Moto Z into a professional-quality camera, which Yang says is “in process.”
Click to enlarge |
“You can have unlimited mods,” he adds.
The Mods, which snap easily into the Moto Z through a set of 16 tiny magnets and connectors, achieve some of what Google has been trying to accomplish with its Project Ara modular smartphones (or LG with its G5 flagship phone), but Yang says that while Google’s modular prototype forces compromises in performance, the Moto Mods don’t.
He hopes Moto will attract scores of third-party developers to expand the Moto Mod into an ecosystem of devices.
Yang invited Lenovo “product engineer” Ashton Kutcher on stage to introduce the Moto Mods.
“It’s easy to get caught up in incremental advancements, but this is a full-blown game-changer,” Kutcher said. He introduced a Moto Mods developer program, which he said would unleash a wave of hardware add-ons to smartphones. “The options are truly unlimited,” he said. (Kutcher also had an earlier cameo to drop a Moto Z Force from a second floor onto a hard surface – the screen didn’t shatter.)
The Moto Z will be available in Australia with Lenovo tipped to be working on a major relaunch of the Motorola brand in Australia for September 2016.
Click to enlarge |
