Motorola Raises Barely a Ripple in the Tablet Wave

Some disappointing numbers in Motorola Mobility’s latest earnings report: A loss of $80 million on revenue of $3.4 billion, and mobile device shipments of 10.5 million versus 11.3 million a year ago. Still, few were as grim as these: 200,000 tablets shipped in the fourth quarter and just 1 million shipped for all of 2011. In other words, it took MoMo a full year to ship 1/15th the number of iPads Apple sold in its most recent quarter.

And this is the company that Google has decided to spend $12.5 billion on.

Of course, Motorola Mobility has always known it had its work cut out for it on the tablet front. As Christy Wyatt, VP and general manager for mobile devices, told AllThingsD’s Ina Fried last month, “I think tablets have come a long, long way. Adoption of Android tablets in the broad consumer sense, and especially with enterprise users, is still something we would like to focus on for the next year. A lot of that has to do with the application ecosystem, making sure we have the applications that we need. [Google’s] Ice Cream Sandwich [Android update] goes a long way to unify the developer communities across screens.”

And why will people pick Motorola out of the legion of Android contenders? “At the end of the day, there are certain brands that consumers trust,” said Wyatt. “People tend to go to the Motorola brand where they are looking for a brand that they trust for reliability, for quality.”