Lenovo will stop using the Motorola name for its phones in 2016
Motorola owner Lenovo will stop using the Motorola name for its phones in 2016. Instead, the company will call its cheaper phones Vibe and its high-end devices Moto.
“We’ll slowly phase out Motorola and focus on Moto,” Motorola Chief Operating Officer Rick Osterloh told CNET on Thursday.While Motorola hasn’t really used the name “Motorola” on its phone packaging since 2013, the name was still used in conjunction with the Moto devices, but from now on they’ll be branded Moto by Lenovo.
The “batwing” M logo will still be prominent on the devices, and Lenovo will keep the Motorola name alive in a business context, though.
The Motorola name used to be synonymous with the mobile phone — after all, the company launched the first commercial cell phone, the DynaTAC 8000X, in 1984 — but the company struggled to keep pace with the competition in the late 2000s, and was acquired by Google in 2011. The company subsequently sold it to Lenovo in 2014.