[Jon3G]

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 29th June 2005 20:15 GMT
Motorola has acquired the R&D team and the patent portfolio of Sendo, which went into administration today. Sendo is Britain's only mobile phone manufacturer, and shipped 5m handsets last year.

The deal affects around 200 engineers, 170 in Birmingham and 30 in Singapore, and around 90 patents or patent applications.

Sendo was founded in 1999 and has had some success with imaginative budget phones aimed at developing markets. But the brutally competitive cellphone market has been tough on lower tier vendors.

In March, Sendo referred Ericsson to the EC Antitrust department, after the latter filed suit against Sendo for patent infringement. Sendo MD Hugh Brogan described the litigation as "unprovoked and unnecessary".

Last year, Sendo settled an antitrust action against Microsoft out of court. Sendo had pulled its Microsoft-based smartphone on the eve of launch in 2002, and alleged that Microsoft handed the design to HTC. (See Microsoft's masterplan to screw phone partner.)

In the settlement, Microsoft relinquished its stake in Sendo and admitted no wrong doing. Sendo subsequently turned to Nokia and shipped a Series 60 smartphone last year. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/29/motorola_sendo/

[Jon3G]

Another bit of information about the Sendo business

By Guy Kewney, Newswireless.net
Published Thursday 30th June 2005 07:35 GMT
Comment Sendo is dead; there is now nothing left of it, except a new set of features for Motorola, which has formally announced its purchase of Sendo from the administrator.

Effectively, Sendo went bust because its gamble failed; it should have been the world's leading provider of smart phones, but had to quit the business when it fell out with Microsoft, and start all over with Nokia/Symbian.

The company was making money, but spending more. It was, say competitors, winning business by two ploys. The first was its breakthrough ploy, and that's the one which Motorola has bought it for: the ability to produce a phone that does everything the operator wants.

"The difference between Motorola and Sendo," said one source today, "was that if Vodafone said: "We need these features for Vodafone Live!" then Motorola would say: "Let's get working, and we'll have something for you in nine months!" while Sendo would say "OK, we'll do it now."

Another source said: "The 'entire intellectual property portfolio – including 50 existing and 40 pending patents' which Motorola referred to in its release is half of the reason. The software they want is the software which allowed Sendo to configure a phone for people like Orange for Orangeworld - but almost more important, is getting the people at Sendo who knew how to configure that software."

Motorola already has a Symbian licence, and the deal doesn't give it Sendo's Series 60 licence. Some sources insist that nonetheless, the move shows a significant move away from Windows Mobile, following the cancellation of its long-awaited WM Bluetooth phone recently - but that is almost certainly wishful partisan thinking, since Motorola has both Symbian and WM phones on its road-map.

Partisan thinking is also behind suggestions that Sendo's collapse owes nothing to Microsoft's actions in the split between the two corporations.

The most recent disaster, admittedly, was Ericsson's doing, not Microsoft's: but the crunch was inevitable, after Microsoft's attempt to pull the plug on Sendo (analysis shows how easily this could have been deliberate).

At the time Microsoft and Sendo parted company, Sendo was the sole provider of the only Microsoft smartphone in the world; it was literally years ahead of all rivals, except perhaps for Nokia with its Communicator. Because of the collapse of the Microsoft-Sendo partnership, however, Sendo found itself as far behind the mass market as it had been in front.

Smart phones were crucial to founder Hugh Brogan's strategy. They are deliciously high margin products, and also high profile. Without the smart phone, the only way Sendo could win contracts was:

by offering to customise them for "added value" services like Vodafone Live!
by cutting the margins below the bone.
The hope was that the company's financiers would stand by it until it reached the point where it could start charging market rates, and making profits.

"Actually, they might have managed that," said one source, who works for a company that contracts to Motorola, "but for the fact that they built some very poor phones. Poor build quality meant they were struggling to win repeat contracts from several networks."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/30/motorola_sendo_takeover/