TAKEOVER: Motorola To Buy Symbol Technologies For US$ 3.9 billion

[Rocco Augusto]

"Motorola today confirmed, it will acquire Symbol Technologies Inc. for about US$ 3.9 billion in a deal that expands the world's second-largest cellphone maker's presence in the market for business-oriented mobile devices. The deal for Symbol, which makes portable bar-code scanners and customized (mostly Windows Mobile-based) handheld computers, is expected to close in late 2006 or early 2007, pending regulator clearance and approval by Symbol shareholders, company officials said."

http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/augusto-20069021-motologo.gif

Not sure how much this will affect the Smartphone world since Symbol Technologies mostly worked with Pocket PC devices, but it would be nice to have a couple bar-code scanners for our Smartphones. :)

[dh]

I'm hoping this will be a good thing for Symbol customers because the old Symbol Technologies is one of the worst companies ever to have to do business with. I wouldn't have paid 3.9 cents for that pile of poo.

I've had the misfortune to be a Symbol partner for years and they have gotten worse all the time.

One of their latest little stunts has been to stop making any Palm OS devices and switch completly to Windows. While many here might see this as a good thing (and Symbol's Palm products really were utter crap), they made this change with zero warning to their customers, leaving many businesses who had made a big committment to Symbol and Palm with no-where to go. They promised a migration plan to help migrate these sad clients over to WinCE but in typical Symbol fashion just left them and did sod all.

Oh, Symbol also bought one of the top RFID companies, Matrix Technologies, and totally screwed them over. I hope we see most of the Symbol people get kicked out faster than you can say "Hello Moto!!!!"

I guess that by this time next year my daughter will be demanding that new Razr phone with integrated barcode scanner and RFID reader. Bah!

dh