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Motorola working on next-generation Webtop with Chrome support

Motorola working on next-generation Webtop with Chrome support

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Motorola is working on a new version of its Webtop technology with support for Google Chrome, CEO Sanjay Jha has said.

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Motorola Lapdock 100
Motorola Lapdock 100

In our roundtable discussion with Sanjay Jha today, Motorola's CEO slipped a couple revelations around its Webtop initiative — the laptop-alternative OS tucked away on many of the company's newer Android phones. As it exists today, the system has been widely panned for its limited capabilities — it's basically desktop Firefox with access to your Android applications — but Jha says that work on the next iteration of Webtop is underway. "Financial, in terms of our take-up rate, it's somewhere in the nine percent range," Jha said, suggesting that less than a tenth of buyers of Webtop-capable Moto devices are actually using it. When asked whether they'll continue using Firefox, he said that they'd continue to support it but that Chrome would be supported as well. "What we call the next generation of Webtop will have more capabilities," he said, indicating that Android 4.0 would make it "much smoother and much more integrated."

Every indication is that Jha is still fully committed to Webtop as a concept, but he acknowledges that it can definitely get better — the question is whether the next version will deliver on the promise.