Motorola Plans Snapdragon Flagship, Lenovo Laptops, AR Glasses

Qualcomm-powered Lenovo laptops will be joined by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-powered flagship phone and Qualcomm-powered Lenovo AR glasses this year, according to presenters at this year's Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit.

“You will not only see Snapdragon 8 on an upcoming flagship device, but you will also see lightweight, wearable, and purposely built solutions for AR and VR,” says Motorola's Head of Customer Experience Ruben Castano. The phone will be Moto Edge branded, he adds.

Motorola will also release a future AR headset, powered by Qualcomm, through Verizon. “Motorola is exploring how Snapdragon 8 can support consumer adoption of AR and VR solutions,” Castano says.

Creating ‘One Lenovo'

Lenovo has been making Qualcomm-powered, 5G laptops for a few years now, although they've never been high-volume products. The new 8cx Gen 3 chipset has considerably greater power than the Gen 2 it replaces, and Lenovo continues to be committed to producing laptops using Qualcomm's chips.

“I think you're starting to see it at the infancy of where it is today, from a Lenovo standpoint,” says Lenovo's president for North America, Vlad Rozanovich.

While Qualcomm's application performance hasn't been up to the level of competing Intel chipsets, superior battery life can make the difference. “Battery life is something that's very intriguing to people,” Rozanovich says. “We use so much customer experience analysis and data collecting, [and] the number one thing that always comes up with laptops is battery life.”

Speeds are getting better too, he says. “The silicon continues to get better and better with every generation. Eventually you're going to start encroaching on that X86 experience.”

That could come in 2023. While the new 8cx laptop chipset is based on last year's Cortex-X1 cores, Qualcomm may very well leapfrog ARM's Cortex-X2 to use its own custom cores from Nuvia when it samples the Nuvia-based chipset in late 2022.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said at an analyst event in November that the Nuvia-based chips would be “competitive” with Apple's M-series. “That's a possibility,” says Qualcomm Senior Director of Product Management Miguel Nunes.

Motorola will work with Verizon on an AR solution.

Will Motorola Be the Next BlackBerry?

This is all part of a strategy, says Rozanovich. After years of decoupling the Lenovo and Motorola product lines somewhat, the company is now looking at how to work together under a “one Lenovo” strategy.

Lenovo has a very strong position in corporate laptops—this article is being written on a Thinkpad X1, for instance. In industries such as finance where IT departments manage employee phones, Rozanovich sees an opportunity to expand.

Corporate and education clients may be more comfortable with carrier-restricted 5G laptops than consumers are, Rozanovich says. While consumers don't appear to like their laptops tied to a particular carrier or service plan, a board of education may be less picky about connected Chromebooks destined for low-income families, as long as they're connected to the carrier the organization has a deal with.

Lenovo's existing corporate clients, meanwhile, are looking for phones that can easily be managed by IT departments already accustomed to working with Lenovo laptops.

“As I was traveling to New York City, with some of the Wall Street accounts, everybody's like, I want ThinkShield [management] capabilities on my Motorola phone,” Rozanovich says. In a recent corporate focus group, more than half of attendees said they wanted IT-manageable phones, he says.

But Motorola's current midrange product line doesn't satisfy those clients; bankers don't want a Moto G. That's where the promised, Moto Edge-branded 8 Gen 1 phone comes in.

“People trust the X1 Carbon; they view it as the flagship of the PC industry. We want to create that same type of emotional response from Moto as well,” Rozanovich says.