Bear Stearns:Motorola: Q Should Sell for $50 By Year End

SeekingAlpha.com covers a client research note from Andy Neff at Bear Stearns about Motorola (MOT) with the following key excerpt:

During his keynote speech at the 17th Annual Bear Stearns Conference, Ron Garriques, President of MOT’s Mobile Division, noted that initial sales of Q are ramping strongly and running at a similar rate as the initial run-rate of RAZR. In addition, he expects the subsidized price of Q (from carriers) to decline from $199 to about $50 by end of this year owing to volume improvements. MOT expects to launch a UMTS version of Q by the year-end, when its exclusivity ends with Verizon.

Reinforcing our concerns about PALM’s cost disadvantage, Garriques highlighted MOT’s significant IP portfolio as one of the key factors (other being volume) that will enable them to lead the market in terms of cost as other handset vendors (HTC, PALM and AAPL, if AAPL enters the market on its own) must pay licensing fees to IP owners, including MOT. Stock impact: negative for PALM, RIMM.

50 bucks would be a very nice price for a Winodws Mobile 5 smartphone and is definitely aimed squarely at the mainstream market. Let's hope it happens sooner than later so other handsets follow suit. Plus,Verizon (VZ) needs to catch a clue about charging more reasonable prices for its EV-DO data network. I mean, Sprint's (S) all-you-can-eat data plan is only $15 a month....