In an unexpected move, Google on Wednesday announced that it sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for close to $3 billion, although the Search giant will still keep some parts of Moto, including the patents it acquired to defend Android. However, Lenovo may also walk away with a perk of its own, an inclusion in the Nexus family, if one of Eldar Murtazin’s newest tweets is to be believed.
The Russian mobile blogger, who has a mixed track record with similar leaks, said that “Lenovo will launch one of the last Nexus products,” adding that “volume will be huge, and it will be focused on the U.S. market.” However, he did not reveal whether the device in question will be made by Lenovo or Motorola, or whether the product will be a next-gen Nexus 6 smartphone or a Nexus tablet.
Murtazin also added that because “Lenovo isn’t [a] private company,” as the Chinese government has a stake in it that means “U.S. market/carriers aren’t open to Lenovo right now.”
Interestingly, a few days ago Murtazin also said that the Nexus family will die in 2015, with Google rumored to create a new brand to follow the Nexus, based on the current Google Play Edition devices. He also made several other predications related to Google’s new relationship with Samsung, with some of them already coming true. Murtazin said that Motorola will be “reprofiled,” as Google does not want to compete in hardware against Samsung and other companies, which turned out to be true.
He further added that more Samsung devices may be included in the Google Play Edition family in the future, and mentioned that TouchWiz will evolve in extra features to become “an integral part of future Android versions.” A few days later it was revealed that Google pretty much backed up Samsung into a corner, unhappy with its current TouchWiz features, leading many to believe that future Samsung Android devices will be much closer to stock Android than previous devices. Those reports sort-of resonate with Murtazin’s claims related to future Google Play Edition devices and TouchWiz features.
Considering that Motorola has been mostly focused on the U.S. market so far, it would not be surprising to see Motorola as the company in charge of a Lenovo Nexus device, assuming Murtazin’s unnamed sources are right. Moreover, since Motorola has not created an Android tablet in years, it would make sense to think that the company would rather work on a Nexus 6 smartphone than a Nexus tablet – that’s just speculation at this point, based on a yet-to-be confirmed rumor.
Motorola was said to work on Nexus devices in the past, especially after the Google acquisition, but the company never delivered such a device.