It's amazing the kinds of neat things that can happen once you manage to turn lemons into even just a drop or two of bittersweet lemonade. Take Motorola, for example: a manufacturer that's fallen on hard times by even the loosest definitions manages to turn a sliver of profit for itself, and boom, suddenly you've got yourself a shiny new CEO and a smiling analyst or two. Jim Suva of Citi Investments seems to be going to bat for Moto at a time when everyone was just about ready to abandon ship, saying that the most recent earnings announcement represented the "early innings a gradual steady improvement", expressing confidence that new CEO Jha's hiring was a good thing, and hooking up the company's stock with a "buy" rating. 'Round here, we judge a company's success mainly by the greatness of its hardware, but you need solid financials to fund the R&D to make said hardware happen -- so we suppose this really could be a solid start to a genuine turnaround.

Uh oh, Moto. Go 'head with your bad self. Just days after posting a meager profit (but a profit nonetheless) and maintaining your position in third in worldwide mobile market share, along comes a report claiming that you're still numero uno in the United States. While handset sales overall shot up 5.3% here in Q2, Motorola maintained a 26% share and managed to stare down at least a few naysayers. In related news, LG held tight to the silver with 22%, while RIM gained a double-digit market share increase thanks to sales of its oh-so-hot BlackBerry handset. Number nerds, feel free to tap the read link for even more fractions and decimals.

[Via RCRWireless]

According to the oracle-like superbrains at J. Gold Associates, Google's Android OS and Nokia's Symbian will "combine to provide a single open source OS," sometime in the very near future... say, three to six months. Sure, Android is just about to launch on devices in late 2008, and Nokia just announced in June that it will be moving Symbian towards open source -- and of course the two companies have no formal relationship that would come close to permitting such a collaboration. Still, J. Gold assures us this is happening, stating, "A combination of the Android and Symbian efforts would be good for the industry, good for Google and good for Symbian." In related news, we understand a handful of similar mergers are in the offing: Linksys and Belkin, Red Hat and Ubuntu, Engadget and Gizmodo, and the inevitable one-two punch of Coke and Pepsi.

Update: Craziest thing, it turns out that Google, Nokia, and Symbian are all dismissing the platform merger talk as utter nonsense. And for once, we believe those trusty souls; who knows, maybe it's the complete lack of technical synergy between them?

With Planet Earth's wireless juggernauts jumping on the LTE train while there's still room, we suppose the latest report from ABI Research isn't all that shocking. According to it, there will be some 32 million LTE network subscribers by 2013, and with the commercial launch not expected to go down before 2010, our abacus suggests that we're talking about 32 million over just 3 years. The firm asserts that the Asia-Pacific region will account for most of those folks (around 12 million), while the rest get split 60% / 40% between Western Europe and North America. You think we're just going to let you make this outlandish claim and then fuhgetaboutit, don't you ABI? Nah, we're creating a Google Calendar reminder for this day in 2013 right now to check back and see just how accurate you really were.

[Via SlashPhone]

Hey, that's what Nomura International analyst, Richard Windsor, told his clients in a note published this morning. Instead of handsets, Moto may choose to refocus on becoming an "enterprise and government company." While on a roll, Richard also raised speculation that a Chinese company might scoop up the troubled Moto before calling it "unlikely as those vendors don't have much of an idea how to fix Motorola's problems." Problems he attributes to the platform and software, not hardware. Man Moto, what a long hard fall it's been since your 2005 RAZR heyday.

Although "innovative" isn't exactly the word we chose to use when summing up Palm's Centro, apparently the public at large sees things a little differently -- or, so says this report, anyway. According to a buyer behavior writeup from Strategy Analytics, the Centro "attracted the most attention from nearly half of the tested US consumers who are intending to purchase a new mobile device" in Q4, and it even ranked ahead of the second-place Samsung i760 in the "appealing" department. Both of the aforementioned handsets were hailed as the top choices (saywha?) for folks "seeking a multifunction, fully integrated device," while the Nokia Prism and LG Rumor also got a few props along the way. Of course, it's always best to take these "studies" with a healthy serving of salt, but if you wanted something to debate about, you've found it.

[Via MobileWhack]

So by now you've heard about a little multi-touch device called the iPhone right? And you're well aware that Nokia is set to deliver their new S60 Touch Interface and likely a few new touch-screen devices sometime in 2008. Well, according to Richard Windsor, an analyst with London-based Nomura, Nokia could see "delays or holdups" in its smartphone strategy if Apple decided to unleash its army of lawyers in defense of its over 200 iPhone-related patent filings. (Note: that's "filings" not patents granted for intellectual property.) According to Mr. Windsor, "I think Apple will likely view Nokia as infringing on its user interface patents." Having said that, he further speculates that Apple and Nokia will likely end up in a settlement by 2009 in order to avoid a lengthy Qualcomm vs. Nokia battle in the courts. Of course, in a system whereby laggards and leaders attempt to gain or maintain competitive advantage through lawsuits and lobbyists rather than the innovations of their own engineers, anything goes. And yeah, we know there are a lot of ifs in there. Still, don't forget that Apple failed to defend the "look and feel" of its Mac OS in court against Microsoft back in the Windows 2.0 days, and Nokia's been making touchscreen devices for years, not months like Apple. So, lesson learned or big trouble in little Espoo, what say you? We're guessing the latter if that demonstration device (on the right) is ever released.

There just wouldn't be balance in the world if a select few didn't come out and starkly disagree with the obvious, right? Somehow, a number of analysts have managed to overlook the smorgasbord of hints, clues and signs that Google is indeed working up some form of software (or hardware) for the mobile realm, and moreover, they're speaking out to denounce the possibility. Specifically, Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, made himself a target by stating that "building an OS is the dumbest thing [Google] could do," and he even led us to believe that he's a developer in a parallel universe by announcing that "cellular telephone code is probably the hardest code to write per line of code for anything." Still, we're beyond the point of wanting Google to come out of the woodwork and say something, but considering the numerous reports claiming that the search giant is indeed in talks with select carriers, it's hard impossible to believe that there's nothing going on behind the scenes.

As the RAZR giveth, so shall it taketh away: what started out as one of the most successful cellphone lines in history -- a line that saw Moto's return to mobile dominance -- ended up being so played out with endless colors and variations that is was ultimately responsible for the company's subsequent slump, too. Ironic, yes, but it looks like the boys and girls out in Schaumburg took away an important lesson from the debacle, pledging at a recent analysts' meeting that they won't let the one-trick-pony syndrome bite again. No specific announcements were made at the meeting, but we can apparently expect the first of a wealth of new products to be unveiled "next month" (the U9, perhaps?) as CEO Ed Zander fights to keep his job and newly-installed mobile chief Stu Reed fights to make his mark. Moto still doesn't expect their handset division to be profitable until next year, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere.

We'll admit, we aren't shocked by the fact that nearly one-quarter of those who have purchased Apple's iPhone thus far are brand new to AT&T, and honestly, we're a tad miffed that the figure isn't a bit higher. Of course, those pesky (not to mention pricey) early termination charges are the likely reason that some 75-percent of iPhone buyers had already hitched their wagon to AT&T before, but a recent study carried out by American Technology Research noted that "a fair amount of customers were willing to pay high early cancellation fees to get out of their existing service contracts for an iPhone." Interestingly, the last mobile to command such a substantial amount of ship-jumping was Motorola's legendary RAZR, and we all know how well that turned out. Still, only time will tell if Apple has a similar hit on its hands, but judging by early reports, things aren't looking too bad at all for Cupertino.

[Image courtesy of Mobilissimo]