Lenovo To Operate Its Mobile Division From Newly-Acquired Motorola Mobility

Lenovo, the Chinese OEM giant, has been snapping up premium US Tech companies as a kid would grab the latest collectible. After the IBM acquisition in 2005, Lenovo’s next major buy from the US was Motorola Mobility in October last year. With this new acquisition, the tech industry was expecting what Lenovo announced last week: Lenovo mobiles would soon be absorbed by the Motorola brand.

Fans of budget smartphones might be crushed to know that one of their budget-friendly Android options might be taken off the market. Whether this rumor would turn out to be true isn’t much of a loss, considering that Motorola is a very trusted brand, especially in Androids.

Lenovo has been known to have maintained, even exceeded the quality of IBM’s Thinkpad line. It stayed in second place to Apple for the years between 2011 and 2014. Its ratings plummeted this year, however, no thanks to the Superfish and Lenovo Service Engine incidents, which were apps pushed onto users and considered major security threats. To bring you up to speed, “Superfish” is adware that Lenovo pre-installed into its machines. Because it spies on users’ preferences, and may be able to record browser activity, including passwords, the discovery of the background app unsurprisingly caused a furor among users and tech pundits alike.

On the other hand, the Lenovo Service Engine is a BIOS-based pre-installed software that couldn’t be removed, even after the user performs a fresh install of Windows. Lenovo has since addressed and sent out patches and fixes for both incidents, and hopefully, they’ll regain trust in the laptop arena.

With Motorola Mobility under their belt, the brand may bring back the trust they may have lost due to these two security-related incidents, at least, in the mobile phone arena.

The tech industry is still in speculation as to what Lenovo means when it released the statement that they are integrating the Lenovo mobile division and running all operations under Motorola. After all, the Lenovo mobile phone brand is enjoying a strong and rather avid following in China, and it could actually hold its own, even with Motorola running its ship.

However, in the light of the news that the Lenovo mobile division was such a liability to the tech company as a whole, that it necessitated the retrenchment of around 3,200 employees in the previous quarter of 2015, the possibility of the Lenovo brand being fully absorbed into Motorola Mobility may become a somewhat saddening reality.

“Somewhat saddening,” as more options are always good for the consumer. At the end of the day, however, with the lack of stark differentiation in the Android smartphone market, streamlining may be just what it needs.