Motorola To Cut More Jobs, Shift Focus to Android Phones

Motorola’s got plenty of problems. A really big one being that their development focus is spread across as many as six mobile phone platforms. To help streamline (err, slash up) things, Sanjay Jha, the new head of mobile phone operations, plans to do what many have been suggesting and suspecting: reduce that number to three, while shifting tons of resources to Android.

Motorola’s still not expected to drop an Android phone any time before 2009, but the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google’s platform is getting tons of attention from Jha (he came from Qualcomm, an OHA member that helped develop Android). Motorola is expected to drop their tangled web of phone OS’s to WIndows Mobile for business use, their own P2K platform for the low-end, and Android for everything else.

That means that any consumer-focused smartphone coming from Motorola will likely be Android powered. (And it also means the employees whose jobs are not related to those platforms, numbering in the “thousands” according to WSJ, are in jeopardy). Whether they’ll be in the Android game early enough to catch up to HTC and friends, we shall see. [WSJ]