A pure Google Motorola Nexus device certainly could be the "holy grail" for some users. Motorola has some of the best hardware on the planet, and although some of their newer software is pretty impressive, most folks would just love to see a Motorola phone unhampered by add-ons. You would think now that Google owns Motorola, it would be an easy thing to make happen. Well, we have both good and bad news regarding that idea. The good news is that we may see something like that next year. The bad news is that it might be very late in the year.
Google's CFO Patrick Pichette spoke at Google's Q3 2012 earnings call yesterday. He shared the following,
Look, we're really pleased with Motorola's progress in its first 150 days. As indicated in our public filings, our team has made a lot of operational changes, we harmonized and narrowed the product portfolio, [undertook] streamlining of software operations, and we scaled back the markets in which we operate. But that said, we're just at the beginning of the Motorola-Google story, and we should expect, as I mentioned before, results from this segment to be quite variable for quite a while yet.
Remember that we inherited an entire product pipeline where hardware business cycles are typically 12 to 18 months.
Reading between the lines in his statement, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that the new Google owned Motorola intends to finish pushing out the phones they currently have in their pipeline, before they consider moving to a pure-Android Moto phone. On the flip-side of that, it's also likely that once the current crop has filtered out, we will start to see Moto's devices sync-up better with the most current Android OS of the time.
Source: TheVerge