Hello again, Moto: after a long absence, Motorola returns to China in February

Motorola’s revamped Chinese homepage, pictured today.

Motorola effectively vanished from China during its Google years, when the revamped company’s newest phones – like the Moto X – put an emphasis on Google apps and services. In a country where many Google services were blocked or throttled ⁽¹⁾ at the time, Motorola had nothing to offer Chinese consumers.

But now that Motorola is owned by China’s Lenovo, Moto is making a return. Yesterday, the official Motorola blog (which is blocked in China) announced the brand’s reappearance with three models – the Moto X, Moto X Pro, and Moto G.

Hello Moto, goodbye Google?

The phones are set to launch in China in early February – that’s more than 18 months after the Moto X first sprang to life in August 2013 (Update: To clarify, China is getting the second-gen Moto X, which first came out in September last year). There are no China prices available and no details yet on whether the phones will be only sold online, which has been Motorola’s strategy of late in countries such as India.

Motorola’s refreshed China homepage has a ticker counting down to January 26, which might be when pre-orders open.

The screenshots on the Moto China page show no signs of Google apps and services on the phones (pictured above), and they appear to be running a light Android skin based on Android 5.0 Lollipop. Again, Motorola has not yet provided specific details about the operating system. All of Google’s services were blocked fully in China in June last year, so the phones will inevitably have to be different from the global versions.

Motorola did quite well in the early days of smartphones in China alongside now-struggling HTC. But Motorola was already falling out of favor in 2011 and 2012 as cheaper yet more powerful phones from Chinese companies like Xiaomi started to gain traction among consumers.

See: China now has 386 million active Android users