Gadgetory

this week Lenovo bought Motorola from Google for 2.9 1 billion dollars now in case you forgot Google just finished buying Motorola Mobility in 2012 for 12 billion dollars this is something I needs explaining hey what is up guys I'm Kim PhD here now as Disclosure a lot of the details of this deal are private and I'm not going to disclose anything that's supposed to be private obviously but I have been in contact with Motorola as a lot of you guys know and I'll continue to stay in touch with them but right now with all the details that we have this is everything you need to know about Motorola being purchased from Google by Lenovo now since there were three major players in this deal itself there are three perspectives to be able to see this from from Lenovo's perspective from Motorola's perspective and from Google's perspective from the Lenovo perspective this is an investment to dive headfirst into the smartphone market in the United States and to be honest this was basically a steal for them at 2.9 billion dollars they could have done a lot worse plus they've been on a bit of a spending spree recently anyway after buying IBM servers but the idea here is when you think of Lenovo what do you think of you think of the PC manufacturer because that's what they do they make ThinkPads their main competitors being Dell and HP what you don't think of when you think of Lenovo is smartphones in the United States because that's just not what they do here fun fact though Lenovo is number five in the count of total smartphones shipped in the fourth quarter of 2013 worldwide they have a killer international presence they're one of the biggest smartphone sellers in the world so obviously since the PC market isn't exactly exploding the figure they'd focus on mobile and what better way to do that than to buy up a company in the United States and get a huge kick start on entering the u.s. smartphone business instead of starting from scratch Lenovo by buying Motorola gets all of Motorola's relationships with US carriers all their product designers and a development team and Motorola's reputation they get all that in a bundle that's what we like to call brand equity and if lenovo is smart they'll keep that they'll keep the motorola name up front and continue operations just the way they were business as usual just with Lenovo pulling strings behind the scenes Lenovo is hoping that moves like this will in five years or so make them number one in the United States it's possible you know I you know the number one thing I'm worried about here with Lenovo is that if you look at all the other designs of their phones they are really bland and obviously they're all mid-range to low-end phones for the most part but I'm not very excited about Lenovo phone designs from what I've seen and I don't even know if those will do well in the United States so what I'm hoping is they definitely keep those motorola designers on board who are helping around with the Moto G and Moto X and get them very into the talks of the next Motorola smartphone the Motorola perspective is really not all that interesting you know a deal is a deal they're kind of being tugged back and forth right now but like I said if lenovo is smart and if they continue with that Motorola branding and they leave the Motorola name up front they shouldn't have any problems and they should let Motorola operate like business as usual that's what they were doing underneath Google a lot of people think that they were working like this with Google they were kind of working with Google behind the scenes and Lenovo needs to be that behind the scenes again even if they want their name on everything and then there's the Google perspective which is a lot more interesting because it's actually about more than just Motorola so when Google first bought Motorola Mobility for 12 billion dollars back in 2012 there's a lot of speculation about why did they do this are they going to make a phone together is the next next is going to be a Motorola phone these were serious questions that people had so basically to clear it all up for the financial purchased Google made a blog post on their site and it's actually still there I'll have it linked below the like button where they gave the reasons and the benefits for buying Motorola and those two main reasons were they might make some phones together work together a little bit and Motorola's patent portfolio with the Motorola acquisition Google picked up more than 15,000 patents to protect Android now of course after this acquisition a lot of us are still asking the question like moto Nexus is that happening or not how closely is Google working with mortar rollin now check out this clip from the interview I had with the CEO of Motorola literally about two months ago so back to just a whole Motorola thing as you guys as Google and Motorola work together I have no idea how closely are far apart they're working so what are like Google and Motorola working on together because Moto X was a pretty awesome collaboration in the first place well no moto X was all Motorola I mean so Motorola is all we're owned by Google so we have financial support from Google but we operate completely independently and and and Google has been pretty clear that it wants to preserve that independence because Android is an open-source platform and and it's important for any partner who wants to build a product based on Android to be treated the same way so if you're Samsung or Sony or HTC and you hear that you know sure you could take his word for it but honestly ever since that acquisition it seemed like to a lot of people and a lot of vendors that now Motorola was the favored OAM Motorola got first did this Motorola was the favorite of Google who was making Android and that made a lot of them uncomfortable and a lot of them like Samsung made moves away from Android and started to prepare themselves otherwise you can see a lot of this and Samsung's TouchWiz and their new magazine UI but yes Google did Believe It or Not keep up a firewall between them and Motorola then Lenovo came along with their ambitions and they said hey can we buy that from you and they said sure but they sold away parts of Motorola not all of it they kept that massive patent portfolio and they also kept under the Android division the advanced technology and projects part which was responsible for project ara the modular smartphone concept so they kept a lot of cool stuff and they'll continue to work with that the rest of Motorola Mobility was sold for 2.91 billion still pretty low still a steal for Lenovo but obviously a great acquisition so if my math is right google gave Lenovo a hell of a deal and also values those thousands of patents a lot like that billions of dollars try suing us now Apple like that's some serious patent protection right there I should also note that Google also bought nest for three billion dollars neces the makers of those beautiful smart thermostats and smoke detector things like that they also already also seem to be integrating with Google way more than mortirolo ever did so they seem to be much more of a hardware partner so I'm actually excited to see what they do together so the number one question we're seeing now is what is going to happen to current Motorola devices like the Moto X and the Moto G just a couple of weeks ago I was at CES talking with Rick Auster lo who was the vice president on Motorola who was showing me you know really proud of all the updates are rolling out with and he was showing out the new a would back for the Moto X that was going to be available soon does that all just stop well again if Lenovo is smart they won't touch a thing they'll let it continue business operations as usual and then slowly take advantage of Motorola's resources and relationships later so I would say right now this doesn't affect the day-to-day stuff that Motorola is doing with Moto X and Moto G but again the thing about these things is these deals they take a while they're large financial transactions they take a while to go through so I'll keep in touch with them and if I hear any updates I will let you guys know on Twitter if you guys want to follow at mkbhd you will definitely hear the first of that I might have also heard that Google and Samsung have been in these talks and that they might have something to do with the sale so the end result of this is that Google's selling Motorola to stop competing with Samsung and others and Samsung is asked by Google to stop altering and screwing with Android so much and even if that wasn't the original intention of the deal that still has that effect ever you know ever since Google bought Motorola there is always that awkwardness about the other manufacturers because like I said it felt like Motorola was the favored one so now that Google has sold Motorola there is no favored one Google's not competing anymore you know they're not part of Motorola now it's an open even playing field and they ask that Samsung dial it back a bit and let Google control Android a bit more in return so Google's making moves and you know I understand it may be kind of sad to see Google and Motorola split because it seemed like right when Motorola started working with Google they started doing really great things they were on a roll with the Moto X a great phone and a Moto G a really inexpensive value phone but you got to remember that it's been reiterated by Motorola over and over again that that was all Motorola and that they will continue to do awesome stuff like that even without Google's financial backing because they're in a different mindset altogether even if they're under lenovo now instead of Google so to summarize google buys Motorola for the patents supercharges them a little bit and then lets them go and Lenovo comes in and buys them and hopes to keep the momentum going and try to make some money off of it we'll see how that goes Samsung on the other hand who was asked by Google to tone down with the TouchWiz customizations we will stop competing we sold Motorola the playing fields even we just want to control Android so this has been mkbhd thank you for watching guys and I hope you continue to watch because I will have my eye on all three of these companies for 2014 thank you for watching and I'll talk to you guys in the next one peace you