Google buying Motorola Mobility

[Xaroxantu Zero]

Quite the Monday morning headline:

Happy Monday to you, and happy Monday to Motorola Mobility, which Google has announced is about to become its next acquisition. This comes hot on the heels of a $56 million Q2 net loss for Moto -- and CEO Sanjay Jha's less than subtle hints about going fishing for Android-related patent royalties. Now, at a price of $40 per share for a total of about $12.5 billion, Big G will be making Moto a "dedicated Android partner" to "supercharge the Android ecosystem" and "enhance competition in mobile computing."

Source

[Cos]

Yay new actual android phone

[ExtraSlow]

I always liked motorola handsets, let's hope google makes use of this strong skillset.

[Dehvee]

Google's just trying to stockpile their patents to defend Android from Apple.

In other news from RIM: Y U NO BUY US

[supe]

This is very interesting news. The article on BGR reads "HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson sound off on Google’s Motorola acquisition". I took this as they were definitely not happy but its actually the opposite, they all welcome and support the move. I wonder how Google's acquisition of these patents benefits the other partners.

12.5 B is a lot of money and can be seen as a waste for just patents, but at least they also got a company out of it and one with a deep and proven history in the mobile market. The bidding for Nortels patents went into the billions and those were just the patents. This move clearly moves Google out of the defensive and arms Android to push deeper into the smart phone market.

[Zephyr]

HTC and Samsung must be worried now. Their main OS supplier now can design and create their own hardware without really needing the other hardware companies now.

Will this mean a more improved UI design for Android now that they also control hardware specs? Will the UI finally be more standardized for both users and developers instead of being different for every phone?

Now this makes Android seem way more appealing now.

[supe]

Something interesting, this guys analysis of the patent situation concluded this outcome two weeks ago.

http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/0...-buy-motorola/

[Zephyr]

http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/15/g...a-patents-for/

This is a more legit article as the writer is an actual Patent Lawyer.

[A790]

Bad news for Microsoft... no possibility of a WP7 Motorola phone now.

[Kardon]

This partnership should work extremely well motorola does great hardware and styling but has always fallen down on the software side (imo).

[KLCC]

The question becomes, is google going to acquire interdigital, now they got a lot of patent from Moto.

[Zephyr]

Originally posted by A790
Bad news for Microsoft... no possibility of a WP7 Motorola phone now.

They have Nokia still, which isn't too bad

[Xaroxantu Zero]

In case you were wondering who will be making the next Nexus phone:

http://gizmodo.com/5830887/where-the...is-coming-from

The Nexus program is what Google uses to raise the bar for hardware manufacturers. It's gotta run the latest and greatest version of Android, and it's gotta run it well. Every year around Christmas time, Google picks a hardware manufacturer to make the next Nexus phone. They then have about nine months to build it. Interesting. We knew that Google works closely with whomever is building their next Nexus, but it sounds like Google is calling the shots even more than we thought. It would appear that they say what they need, and then manufacturers climb over each other and bid to build the thing.

You might be wondering if Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility will give Motorola a leg up. Google says no, they will have to bid to build it just like everyone else. Hooray for competition!

[iceburns288]

Will this mean the beginning of the end of MOTOBLUR? Moto hardware has been great, but maybe we'll finally see at least an option for vanilla Android on their devices.

Also, it'll be interesting to see what becomes of Webtop now.

[Xtrema]

Sounds like Google is only interested with the patents to go up against Apple/MS/RIM.

I doubt ops of Moto will change.

[ZEDGE]

Originally posted by iceburns288
Will this mean the beginning of the end of MOTOBLUR? Moto hardware has been great, but maybe we'll finally see at least an option for vanilla Android on their devices.

Also, it'll be interesting to see what becomes of Webtop now.

Motoblur has been gone for a bit now. (stuck on older phones though) The new version is more vanilla Android with motoblur style widgets. Newer phones like the Atrix etc have been updated.

[4DoorGTZ]

I call MS buying Nokia before the year ends.