Google Acquires Motorola Mobility to 'Supercharge' Android

Image via CrunchBase

August is normally a slow news month, but not today. Google announced Monday that it will acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in order to "supercharge" its Android mobile operating system and build up its patent portfolio.

In a blog post championing the acquisition, Google chief Larry Page insisted the acquisition will not change Google's commitment to keeping Android open. "We will run Motorola as a separate business," he wrote. "Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences."

Andy Rubin, senior vice president of mobile at Google, echoed those sentiments. "We expect that this combination will enable us to break new ground for the Android ecosystem. However, our vision for Android is unchanged and Google remains firmly committed to Android as an open platform and a vibrant open source community," Rubin said in a statement. "We will continue to work with all of our valued Android partners to develop and distribute innovative Android-powered devices."

Perhaps more important to Google's bottom line will be the acquisition of Motorola Mobility's patent portfolio. "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," Page wrote.

Earlier this month, Google accused Apple, Microsoft, and other tech giants of trying to "strangle" Android with its coordinated patent purchases and pledged to "intensely" defend its mobile OS through patent purchases of its own and opposition to what it considers anti-competitive patent bids.

Last month, a consortium of tech rivals purchased 6,000 wireless technology patents held by Nortel, which Google had said it wanted to buy. Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Sony joined forces to purchase the patents, which cover wireless, wireless  4G, data networking, optical, voice, Internet, service provider,  semiconductors, and other patent portfolios. Microsoft and Apple also teamed up to purchase patents from Novell, along with Oracle and EMC.

Page said Motorola's 2008 decision to "bet big" and make Android the sole operating system across all of its smartphone devices "is one of many reasons that there is a natural fit between our two companies."

"We believe that their mobile business is on an upward trajectory and poised for explosive growth," Page wrote. "The combination of Google and Motorola will not only supercharge Android, but will also enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences."

"We have shared a productive partnership with Google to advance the Android platform, and now through this combination we will be able to do even more to innovate and deliver outstanding mobility solutions across our mobile devices and home businesses," said Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility.

Google said it hopes to close the deal by the end of 2011 or early 2012, pending regulatory approval.

Stay tuned for more details.

Google Android Now on 135 Million Devices

Google's Larry Page had a quite successful first quarter.

Among the highlights was certainly Android, which is now said to be present on more than 135 million active devices. According to Google, 550,000 Androids are now activated every day and there have been more than 6 billion App downloads.

Google is categorizing Android as a "high consumer success" product, next to Chrome and YouTube. Page noted that Google is heavily investing in those segments to ensure their "long-term success." Android appears to be especially growing like a weed as the activation count was at just 500,000 per day a month ago and the total device count was at just 100 million two months ago. Google noted that more than 250,000 apps are now available for Android.
Page also briefly commented on the patent situation of Android and told investors that Google is building its defense against lawsuits. "Obviously we have a number of intellectual property patents in progress not just already issued." However, he deflected the question by an analyst, by simply adding more numbers explaining the success of Android: 400 different devices, 39 OEMs, 231 carriers in 123 countries: "And that velocity is only increasing. Despite the efforts of some of our competitors, there hasn't been any slowdown in any of those things," Page said.
Of course, that may make Android an even more attractive patent suit target. According to Spencer Wang, an analyst with Credit Suisse, Google holds only about 650 patents in total, which less than the number of patents IBM gets approved every 2 months.

Android Basics Refresher

Covering the fundamentals of the hottest platform in mobile right now.

Reading through my Android notes today, I realised the quick-read format might be useful to others. Although fellow zoneleader James has been featuring some excellent articleson Android, I'd thought give my take in a simpler format - just in case it triggers your memory.

Android Basics

Every app;

• runs in its own Linux process
• shutdown when more resources needed
• each process has its own VM
• assigned its own user ID so its data is visible only to that user (and app)
• can call upon components developed elsewhere to allow for reusability

Activity

An activity is a UI representing a task the user wants to perform, such as entering a phone number into a text-box, or a list of menu items the user must choose from. Applications are made up of many activities. A Java class must extend the Activity class.

Views, or 'widgets', are what make up the components in an activity. As subclasses of View, these represent standard items in a UI such as a button, textbox or Image.

Services, Broadcast Receivers and Content Providers Services

Run in the background. Extend the "Service" base class. The platform will start them by passing Intent to Context.startInstance(). "onStart()" will be called by Android on the instance of a new Service and an Intent passed to it. To get a hold of an established Service (i.e. one that's already running), you can call Context.bindService(); in such a scenario the Service is given an Intent instance and its onBind() method is called.

Broadcast Receivers

Receive and react to broadcast announcements. Examples would be battery is low, or the language has been changed. Extend BroadcastReceiver base class. They do not have a an interface and typically display an icon in the notification area.

Content Provider

Exposes one application's data to another. An extension of ContentProvider, these act on calls from ContentResolver (which other apps invoke) to access data controlled by this provider.

Intents

Activities are started by passing Intent instances to Context.startActivity() or Activity.startActivityForResult().

App Store To Retain Major Market Share of Paid Apps Despite Android Growth

Google’s Android is increasingly becoming popular as most handset manufacturers are adopting the Android platform. We recently reported thatGoogle’s Android Market is expected to surpass the number of apps available inApple’s App Store to become the largest store for mobile apps. But, does more apps mean more revenue?

by 2014 and Apple is expected to retain 60 percent of the paid apps market. In terms of revenue Google’s Android Market is witnessing strong growth as revenue for 2011 is predicted to cross $425 million but is still far behind Apple whose revenue is projected to cross $2.91 billion.

RIM turned out to be the biggest loser as the BlackBerry platform for apps hasn’t attracted many new developers.

The app market (including Apple, Google, Nokia, RIM) is predicted to grow 77.7 percent in 2011 making it cross the $3 billion mark and is expected to show tremendous growth by 2014 and crossing $8.3 billion in revenue.

Google’s Android continue to grow in the number of apps however Apple’s strong presence and well defined ecosystem will help the Cupertino based company maintain the lead when it comes to revenue share.

source  : touchreviews.net