And for the first time in years I actually have a reason to want a Motorola. Google today agreed to acquire the handset division of Motorola, Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion (around 90 billion ZAR). It’s always nice to have money lying around for these little impulse buys.

By all accounts the chief incentive here seems to be patent-guarding; says Google CEO Larry Page:

Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

Beyond the fact that your Motorola-spending cash now goes to Page instead of whoever CEO’d the company before, there isn’t a huge amount changing here; Motorola switched to Android as the sole OS for their smartphones in 2008. Still, this means Google is now in the hardware business, which is a relatively new step for them.

Motorola Mobile is also the maker of the Motorola Xoom tablet, pictured above.

Mighty are your works.

[Source : googleblog]