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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday November 13 2016, @12:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the hello-moto dept.

Campaign Asia reports that gadget maker Lenovo will stop marketing smartphones with its own brand name and adopt the Moto label from here on out.

The company acquired Motorola from Google for $2.91 billion in 2014. It previously announced plans to phase out the 'Motorola' name for handsets at the beginning of this year; the new change comes along with a shake-up of the company's leadership.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out for the Moto brand. As Android Police noted, there's a risk of diluting the sensible nomenclature that Moto currently uses to differentiate its high-end, mid-range and budget phones; Lenovo makes a wide variety of handsets, including the first one to feature Google's Project Tango AR tech.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday November 13 2016, @02:37AM

    by RamiK (1813) on Sunday November 13 2016, @02:37AM (#426189)

    How hard can it be to recompile new code?

    Compile takes 2 hours max on average i5\7 hardware. Incremental takes 10mins. The real problem is fixing stuff when something doesn't work. Old proprietary blobs -> new blobs can have API changes. Sensor calibration files sometimes change format. Hardware specific menus in Settings are commits that need cherry picking and adjusting for newer APIs... And if something goes wrong and you can't boot, debugging and fixing issues is not something you can estimate a deadline for.

    I find it hard to believe that 10 year old phones have such precious source code in their drivers

    IP is the issue. Partner's or even unlicensed, you'd need programmers going through drivers with a fine comb unless you've wrote it in advance with FOSS in mind. Graphics, signal processing (audio, wifi, cell...) and really anything remotely similar to DSPs is likely patented by dozens of different holders. We're talking about the most trivial things imaginable. Here's an nVidia patent for radix sort: https://www.google.com/patents/US7624107 [google.com] Here's a National Instruments's for graphics programming: https://www.google.com/patents/US9235395 [google.com]
    They're getting away with anything. If you're writing a for() loop traversing through an array, you're likely violating a patent. In fact, I'm fairly sure it's possible to prove there's no efficient way to traverse a 2 dimensional array on a DSP without using one patent or the next... Madness.

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