Motorola plans to release a 7-inch tablet and several phones with the same docking capabilities as the landmark Atrix 4G phone by the end of the year, CEO Sanjay Jha said at Morgan Stanley's Media and Telecom Conference today.
The company just released its first Android tablet, the Xoom, last week. Jha didn't give specific numbers for Xoom sales, but said they were a "good start" and that Motorola is already working on a "tiered" strategy with multiple tablets.
"There will be seven-inch, some version of eight-inch, some version of 10, 11 and 12 inch tablets" in the market, although not necessarily all from Motorola, Jha said. Seven inches is definitely on the schedule, though, and Motorola "will have other tablets out by the end of the year," Jha said.
Motorola's smartphones, meanwhile, are heading in the direction of the Atrix - the groundbreaking phone that transforms into a laptop or desktop PC running a "webtop" Linux OS. While Verizon's upcoming Motorola Droid Bionic doesn't have Webtop, that was just a timing issue, Jha said - this is a major platform going forward.
"From June onwards, most of our high-tier performance phones will have the Webtop capability," Jha said. The company hopes to be able to upgrade the Webtop browser to Firefox 4.0 by the end of the year, he said. There's more work to be done as well.
"The performance you see on our devices, there's no doubt it's below what the desktop performance is. … but maybe by the end of this year, maybe by the middle of next year we can deliver performance which is where consumers want [it] to be, but with a brand-new carrier."
Jha didn't explain what he meant by "brand new carrier." He had a few slips of the tongue during the interview, so I can't confirm whether that meant a new wireless carrier.
Android upgrades are also on the Motorola CEO's mind. Motorola, like other Android vendors, has been criticized for not upgrading some phones promptly to the latest version of the Android OS. Motorola made the mistake of choosing a processor for its earliest Android phones that wouldn't work well with new versions of Android, he said. But phones produced since June 2010 are much more upgrade-friendly, he said, and Motorola's phones will get prompt upgrades going forwards.
"I think this was quite frankly a learning experience for the whole industry," he said.
Jha also suggested a little-known advantage of Motorola's Blur social-networking platform. With more than six million Blur phones activated, Motorola is thinking of using the client-server platform for "device diagnostics" to figure out what's frustrating users about their phones.
"Seventy percent of all devices that are returned have no fault found," Jha said. "This gets us a better understanding of what's going on in the device that's causing returns."