SiliconBeat

Motorola Atrix

I reviewed Motorola’s Atrix smartphone in this week’s Tech Files column. What intrigued me about the Atrix are its accessories: one optional dock allows the device to turn into a quasi-laptop; another allows it to turn into a pseudo desktop PC or even an Internet-connected set-top box.

As I wrote in the review, I liked the Atrix and thought the idea of a dockable smartphone had a lot of potential. But I found the docks themselves expensive, underwhelming and their potential largely unrealized.

Since I wrote my column, a reader alerted me to another reason to dislike the docks.

One of the advantages of the docks is that with them, you can use a full version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser to surf the Web and pull up Web apps in much the same way you would on a standard PC. What I didn’t realize was that in order to use the full Firefox browser on AT&T’s data network, AT&T requires users to pay its extra $20 a month tethering fee. (H/T here to blog site These Are the Droids.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Motorola Cliq

When Motorola announced the Cliq smartphone in September, I was pretty intrigued.

I wrote a column about how I thought the Cliq’s interface could represent “the next stage in the evolution of the smart-phone.” I think now that I might have overstated the case.

The Cliq was the first Motorola phone to run Google’s Android operating system. What I found interesting about it was that Motorola had built a custom interface on top of Android that it calls Motoblur. Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to the $3.5 million signing bonus Dell gave Ron Garriques when he was hired to be president of its global consumer group in February 2007, the computer maker also agreed to give him a restricted stock grant every year that was to be worth six times his annual base salary of $700,000 every year through fiscal 2012. It also promised him $3 million in cash that was to be paid out in three equal payments over three years from his original hire date.

Just over two years into his employment, he and the company entered into a “Retention Bonus, Merger and Modification Agreement” that gives him $2 million outright in exchange for Read the rest of this entry »

“One clear sign of the challenging economic environment we face is the decision by executives to take a pay cut,” according to a survey of executive pay practices by Equilar, the Redwood City information services firm that mines SEC filings for compensation data.

Of course, another “clear sign” might be the accelerating rate of layoffs. Newly announced plans to eliminate another Read the rest of this entry »

Motorola added to the growing mix of ways companies are trying to preserve cash during the current economic downturn by discontinuing their matching of employee contributions to the company’s 401(k) pension plan, beginning Jan. 1, 2009, according to a filing it made with the SEC. And on March 1, future benefit accruals and compensation increases will cease for participants under plan as of Feb. 28. (Vesting in the plan will continue for those not already fully vested.)

Given that step, the company also decided to modify Read the rest of this entry »

Motorola filed an update to its employment agreement drawn up in February with co-chief executive Gregory Brown that included information about his stock-based incentive. The size and complexity of the equity awards rival the multiple cash bonus awards we previously wrote about.

The multiple stock awards, which were apparently granted July 31 and vest over the next three years, include: Read the rest of this entry »

Motorola, the troubled communications hardware maker that plans to split its operations into two different publicly held companies, named Qualcomm Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Jha (pictured) to be one of its co-chief executives. Jha will head up the company’s mobile devices division, once the producer of must-have cell phones that failed to keep pace.

Getting an executive to defect from a successful business like Qualcomm, a maker of wireless chips whose stock has risen by more than a third so far this year,to join Motorola, whose shares have dropped nearly 40 percent so far this year after losing 22 percent in 2007. Does not come cheap. Read the rest of this entry »