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We thought the Motorola name was dead, but Lenovo has seemingly made an about turn on the brand that was once synonymous with the flip phone.
Speaking to Cnet, Motorola chairman and president, Aymar de Lencquesaing, said that the brand name will return as Lenovo now has "clarity on how we present ourselves". That’s right, the iconic ‘bat wing’ icon will be back emblazoned on phone cases.
This move comes after HMD announced the new Nokia 3310, a slice of pure nostalgia that returns to the ‘dumb’ phone days of yesteryear. And nostalgia is likely a contributing factor towards this decision to tap into the Motorola legacy, believes Lopez Research analyst Maribel Lopez: "Motorola is an iconic brand that symbolized quality and innovation. It was a bad idea to ditch the name in the first place."
Lenovo bought Motorola from Google in 2014, and last year announced its plans to stop using the name in favour of ‘Vibe’ for its entry-level phones, and ‘Moto’ for its high-end devices. Now, however, the company has made a drastic change to its strategy and will start tying the Motorola name back to new phones on a per-country basis, eventually returning it to all markets where Lenovo has a presence.
The return to the Motorola name of course could just be nostalgia in action as both BlacBerry and Nokia brand names both returned and scored much by way of plaudits from phone fans at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Lenovo will hope that this move will see the company regain some of its mobile phone market share. The company dropped out of the top 5 biggest smartphone maker list after the first quarter of the year.
In the same interview, de Lencquesaing also confirmed that it wouldn’t be releasing another smartwatch, saying that the device type has "too few practical uses".
