Just when it seemed Motorola was on the brink of turning things around, reality had to intrude. Motorola reported its third quarter earnings today. The company suffered a deep loss of $397 million. Worse than that was a comment made by Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha. He said there will be no Android phones from Motorola until the holiday season of 2009.BusinessWeek recently reported that Motorola would have an Android handset ready for the market by the second quarter of 2009. Looks like that time frame was a bit inaccurate, as Motorola's Jha said it will more likely be the second half of 2009 before we see a phone running Android hit the market. That's truly disappointing.

Android has been available to developers for about a year now. It takes most companies 12 to 18 months to develop a phone and bring it to market. HTC managed to bang one out in 11 months. The report that Motorola would have something ready by mid-2009 seemed about on target. Why the schedule has been pushed back, Jha didn't explain.

Either way, it leaves more room for Motorola's competitors to beat it to market with devices of their own. As I reported yesterday, Kyocera, Hop-on, OpenMoko, and even Asus have Android handsets in the works. They all have plenty of opportunity to gain some ground on Motorola.

Motorola managed to remain the world's number three provider of cell phones (how, I don't know). The company sold 25.4 million cell phones in the third quarter, down from the 28.1 million it sold in the second quarter. The cell phone unit lost $840 billion on $3.1 billion in revenue for the quarter. Ouch.