Motorola Has a Lot Riding on Android Phones

Sanjay K. Jha's odds of turning around Motorola's (MOT) beleaguered mobile-phone business appear to be growing longer, as the company's upcoming crop of phones that rely on the Google (GOOG)-backed Android operating system face challenges on several fronts.

Jha was brought in as co-CEO a year ago to rescue Motorola's phone business, which was once the dominant player in the industry but has since lost ground to Nokia (NOK), Apple (AAPL), Research In Motion (RIMM), and Samsung. The cerebral 46-year-old, who spent much of his career at chipmaker Qualcomm (QCOM), quickly tore up Motorola's playbook and began putting together a new strategy. He cut staff and narrowed Motorola's concentration, abandoning its existing plans for a wide variety of phones with numerous underlying technologies. Instead, he's putting pretty much all his chips on advanced phones that run on the Android software. "Our focus right now is Android," Jha said after Motorola's annual meeting in May. "We have to focus to deliver and compete."