they should pick up some return business from disenchanted Samsung owners. I've had the misfortune to have had a U600. Looks great, but full of operability issues. Has put me off Samsung phones for good.

The PH angle. Refer to text above

Well... That is what you get for overendulging in kinky marketing.

All of its latest decent phones are exclusive to a specific operator. For example K3 which is probably one of the best small 3G phones in the UK is exclusive to Vodafone and so on. Newer RAZRs are operator customised and locked to the hilt with features removed en-masse. This leaves the old RAZRs as the main market offering and they are out of date by 2-3 years now.

As a result it is no wonder that users have moved to Nokia, Apple and other alternatives.

The model of "customise to the operator's demands" is dead. Companies using this model are squeezed into a very small space. They have to compete HTC and the like which produce exclusive per-operator models from commodity components and with companies like Nokia which keep their own branding at any cost.

As usually Motorolla missed the fact that world has turned. Just as it did with satellite phones and many other market segments.

Make a decent OS for the phone and replace the crap they have at the minute, they they may have a chance at competing at much better phones out there!

they lasted this long to be honest. I have never had a good experience of Moto fones and its no real surprise they are on the back foot. I don't think their withdrawal from the market can be too far away with Nokia strengthening their position and Samsung and Sony Ericsson producing much better MOR fones. Motorola really don't cut it like they used to and to be honest, they should seriously think about selling off to maybe dell, who can use the existing tech to push their new Google's Android based handsets.

Did i just suggest a new idea?

I'm using a motorola L6 and have done for 1-2 years now. The only reason I still have it is supreme laziness. The software on it is absolutly crap, if I let software that dodgy out of the door in my job I would be fired.

The Razr was a great looking phone. I liked it. Problem is they'e done nothing but revamp the same phone over and over for the last 3 years or whatever it is now! Not just that, the revamp has barely touched the spec of the thing, why 'upgrade' to summat thats pretty much the same?

Get with it Motorola!

So if they spin off / sell the mobile business what's left? Moto disposed of their massive semiconductor business years ago and got rid of various smaller businesses more recently. Surely this is close to the end of Motorola?

No linux geeks pimping the A780? Consumer smartphone with GPS running Linux that the world completely seemed to miss when it was launched? Nice phone but a very bizarre interface.

Not sure what Motorola do to their phones but they always seem to be able to handicap them somehow. Either by having 80% decent but 20% unusable interface, excellent phone but not enough memory for contacts, great looks and useless keypad etc etc.

I would offer a Ralph Wiggumish offer of a pair of crayons, and my milk, but I've commited that to my Tiscali bid.

Moto need a headliner phone... Noidea had the N95, Apple had the Iphone, Sorny Erricson have their massive cameras, Moto need something to match.

That every time the mobile unit goes sour, people assume that it'll be eliminated.

I used to be inside - and after a while, you could almost set the clock to it.

So what do you have left if you spin off/sell mobile, exactly? What division is left that can have the potential to make big gobs of cash should an actual bright idea come forth?

If they were going to bug out of the mobe (sorry) business, you'd think they'd have picked any of the other times that they tanked it - the analog/digital debacle - the early 2000s.

(AC because, well, burning bridges isn't a good thing)

...since the Accompli 008 as far as I'm concerned. A great phone, that I've still got in my mobile phone museum in the loft (I say museum, it's actually a cardboard box ready for the antiques roadshow in 50 years).