Motorola expands relations with Texas Instruments

The art of the “announcement” appears to couple specific news with vague hints at future products. Announcements can reassure investors and analysts and seek to intimidate competitors while keeping one’s own product plans under wraps.
Thus Motorola Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. said they would expand their relationship to include “3G, WiMAX and OMAP technologies in the design and development of new, experience-optimized mobile devices” due in 2008.
Whatever Motorola is doing in the handset department-its rhetoric has shifted somewhat from “wickedly cool devices” to “experience-optimized devices,” perhaps the same thing but with a subtle shift in emphasis from the device to the experience it delivers-it will work with the world’s largest mobile chip vendor to produce it.
The announcement went on to mention “affordable multimedia-rich . handsets” based on TI’s eCosto platform. The two companies said they would leverage intellectual property owned by both parties in their ongoing collaboration.
The announcement may well be aimed at investors, analysts and competitors watching the emerging market segment described today in an ABI Research note on trends in the handset business. Mobile handset vendors will pay more attention to the emerging markets, ABI said, particularly the need to build a “respectable” ultra-low-cost handset portfolio to retain market share. The term “respectable” appears to refer to the need for feature-rich, low-cost phones that can take advantage of growth in emerging markets.
Motorola and Qualcomm Inc. made a similar-sounding announcement in November that focused on UMTS handsets. In that case, Motorola cited an agreement with Qualcomm as “enhancing our flexibility and expanding our range of options” in delivering UMTS handsets “across experiences and price tiers.”