Google buys Motorola's phone division

Looks like things just got more intreasting the mobile world

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/15/google_buys_motorola_mobility_wtf/

That's suprising. Maybe now would be a good time for Microsoft to consider an aquisition of Nokia, so that they too can build their own phones (and tablets).

6 minutes ago,mawcc wrote

That's suprising. Maybe now would be a good time for Microsoft to consider an aquisition of Nokia, so that they too can build their own phones (and tablets).

Microsoft should buy R.I.M. so that I can put Windows 8 on my BlackBerry PlayBook tablet

@mawcc:Why would this be beneficial? No-one knows if Windows Phone will be a success yet, if Nokia fail to come up with hardware and this all fails, Microsoft have far less to lose. Nokia is not what anyone would call an investment, it is going the way myspace.com went

@Proton2:Blackberry will be going the way of the dodo, I predict this company's demise in 5 years

NOK up 10% in pre-market. LOL

So it turns out that Sanjay Jha's recent comment that Motorola would consider using WP7 with a Nokia/Microsoft-style deal was a crock.

I wonder what will happen to Motorolas feature-phones after this. Is it Google's strategy to put Android on /every/ phone model, including the low-end phones? That's a good thing hopefully, because Motorola's software is awful. Remember that Motorola has been an innovator in the past: they made the original mobile phone and they made the worlds thinnest phone.

Apparently speculation has it that this takeover was because of Motorola's extensive patent portfolio, remember how Google/Android was not faring too well against Apple because if patents. I assume and expect Google to license out these patents to their other OEMs so they can step up their game against Apple.

Bad News for Google fan.

Bad News for Google fan.

40 minutes ago,vesuvius wrote

@mawcc:Why would this be beneficial? No-one knows if Windows Phone will be a success yet, if Nokia fail to come up with hardware and this all fails, Microsoft have far less to lose. Nokia is not what anyone would call an investment, it is going the way myspace.com went

Success of Windows Phone depends as much on hardware as it does on software, and if Microsoft really want's to succeed it should try everything to also get that second part of the equation right. Of course one strategy is to just let the hardware partners do their job and hope for the best, but the other one would be to take more control of the hardware by doing it yourself. I guess both approaches are valid, I just thought that maybe now would be a good time to rethink the strategy.

11 minutes ago,blowdart wrote

*snip*

Motorola Mobility spun off as an independent company from Motorola back in January, and at that time it announced it had over 24,000 patents 'granted and pending', though it's thought its actual existing portfolio is around the 17,000 mark. These will now belong to Google.

They don't belong to Google yet.

Edit: Here's an interesting take on the strength of Motorola's patent portfolio.

@mawcc: thing is, the hardware partners cannot be trusted to deliver anything to beat Apple in the quality department. As soon as you have more than one hardware partner you've got a race to the bottom, and you can see it with WP7 devices: they're at least £150 cheaper than an equivalent iPhone, which means less profit, and less future innovation because innovation is a risk that costs money, not something you can afford when you're making razor-thin profits on hardware. The only winner for WP7 is Microsoft.

1 minute ago,blowdart wrote

*snip*

That's hardly a take, but a single sentence comment.

I count two sentences, and I didn't know that a "take" had a minimum sentence requirement.

"Cogito ergo sum" is a single sentence too.