Parent company replaces Motorola brand with Moto by Lenovo

The Motorola name will disappear from smartphones in 2016. Instead, Moto devices will be named Moto by Lenovo. Chinese Lenovo has owned the American phone manufacturer since 2014.

Motorola’s ‘batwing’ logo will remain on the housing, a CEO of the manufacturer told Cnet during CES electronics fair. Lenovo is merging its two phone brands and will sell more expensive handsets in the Moto series, while cheaper phones will fall into Lenovo’s Vibe series. The Vibe series is virtually unknown in Europe and the United States.

The change is likely to have little impact on the design. The name Motorola has been missing on the housing of smartphones and on the box since 2013, so it will probably mainly be references in the software. It could also be that Lenovo decides to put its own name on the housing from now on, where there is currently no logo.

With the disappearance of the brand name Motorola for smartphones, the brand of one of the pioneers of mobile telephony disappears. It was an engineer from Motorola who was the first to call mobile in 1973 and the American manufacturer had its heyday in the 1990s with the DynaTAC. It got a revival with the then-slim flip phone Razr in 2004 and the Android smartphone Droid in 2009.

Google bought Motorola in 2012, mainly because of the patents to protect Android against the countless lawsuits at the time. Under Google, Motorola started with the Moto X and Moto G, the series of smartphones that will probably get a sequel in 2016. Motorola will probably release the Moto X Force with a sturdy screen in the Benelux soon.