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| Edited By: Sreejiraj Eluvangal |Source: DNA |Updated: Apr 13, 2018, 02:32 AM IST
Motorola, the former number two mobile brand which bore the brunt of the economic recession, today started its new innings in India with its new Android (Droid) platform. It launched the much awaited Milestone, the only smartphone to beat Apple iPhone in initial sales, for around Rs32,000 in India.
Like the iPhone, Milestone also has many firsts to its credit, at least in India. It is the first to sport the latest iteration of the Google operating system, 2.1 and the second enterprise-also android phone in India, with a slide out qwerty keypad.
The Droid or Milestone received acclaim from consumers and reviewers alike for combining the multimedia capabilities of the iPhone with more productivity-oriented features like a physical keypad, making it a 'super phone' to many consumers.
According to a mail from Faisal Siddiqui, country head for mobile to all Motorola's employees in India, it will also a 'pinch and zoom' screen and support the android application store, the Android Market.
"Milestone comes preloaded with lifetime free access to fully voice-guided street-level navigable maps of 401 cities in India. This offers voice-guided navigation and routing in the cities and across major national and state highways. With this the Indian consumer can drive to 4,00,000 towns and villages," he said in the email.
The Droid series has literally brought the company back from the edge of disaster. The former number two consistently lost market share to rivals as it was unable to come up with any product series after the run away hit Razr introduced more than five years ago.
Its handset division posted a loss of $1.2 billion during the last quarter of 2007 and there were rumors that it would have to be sold off for as little as a few hundred billion dollars.
The bleeding was followed by vicious job cuts, which are estimated to have impacted around 10,000 people, including many at its India division.
The company's recovery strategy was spear-headed by Sanjay Jha, who joined the company in 2008 to head its mobile phone division, from Qualcomm. Born in Bihar, Jha implemented a strategic reorganisation of the company's phone division based on Google's Android operating system.
Motorola had, till then, been focusing on developing its own operating system for phones, including a proprietary one and another based on Linux.
