Motorola to Aquire Sendo's Smoking Corpse

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mobiletracker.net/archives/2005/06/29/motorola-sendo' target='_blank'>http://www.mobiletracker.net/archives/2005/06/29/motorola-sendo</a><br /><br /></div><i>"As hinted at late last week, Motorola has agreed to acquire parts of Sendo. Motorola is purchasing Sendo's intellectual property portfolio plus the UK and Singapore-based research and development team, including design and test equipment required by that team. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. In 2004 Sendo sold more than 5 million handsets and had revenue of $420 million."</i><br /><br />Sendo is going down in flames, and it looks like Motorola is going to snap up about the only thing they had going for them: their R&amp;D/IP work. Sendo was Microsoft's first Smartphone partner back in the day, but they had a falling out and Sendo never delivered a Smartphone to market. It was a pretty impressive phone for it's time, though I thought the build quality was low. Sendo tried to be a Symbian player, but they weren't overly successful at it - though I'm sure Microsoft would have been pleased to have the 6-7 million phones they were on track to sell this year be Windows Mobile Smartphones. ;-)<br /><br />The Register also has an <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/30/motorola_sendo_takeover/">article on the subject</a>.

[Mike Temporale]

Well, I can't say that I'm surprised (about Sendo closing up. I am surprised about Moto's interest in them) Once the Sendo/Microsoft agreement ended, they really didn't have anything to set them apart from the others. I think they ended up releasing 1 Symbian phone, right? Obviously it didn't do very well.

You're not the first person to mention the build quality of their phone. It makes me wonder what we would be using if they had stayed the course with Microsoft. If the first phone has poor build quality, it's possible that others would follow suit in an attempt to keep their price down and better compete.

[Stinger]

Saying that Sendo and Microsoft had a "falling out" is to put it very lightly.

What Microsoft did to Sendo was an absolute disgrace and was one of the darkest moments in Microsoft's history. Remember when you use your Audiovox SMT5600 or Orange SPV C500 that it contains a lot of technology alledgedly stolen from Sendo. I'm a big fan of a lot of Microsoft's products but sometimes their business practices are border-line criminal.

As a fellow Brit, it's sad to see Sendo go out of business. They did make some pretty poorly built products though and I'm sure that, rather than their smartphone track record, is to blame for their ultimate demise.

[chucky.egg]

Was build quality that bad? (never held a Sendo phone, so I genuinely don't know)

Look at HTC's build quality, it's not going to win any prizes, and yet here I sit with my 3rd HTC model. Because of the build quality it must be at least my 5th handset, but the 3rd HTC model I've owned.

[Stinger]

I had the mispleasure of using a Sendo phone and the battery cover became wobbly within a week of getting it.

Although an end user might put up with poor build quality if the phone offers the features they want for a good price, this article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/30/motorola_sendo_takeover/) seems to indicate that the operators weren't so happy with this situation. And it's the operators who were ultimately Sendo's customers.