Last years 12.5 Billion dollar purchase of Motorola by Google kind of came out of the blue and shocked everyone. Eurpoean and US regulators approved the purchase earlier this year but the Chinese have been more hesitant however they have finally approved the deal with the stipulation that Google keeps Android free for a minimum of 5 years and with the approval by China means that the sale could be finalised as early as next week.
Google has always supplied the Android source code via AOSP(Android Open Source Project) to anyone who wants to compile the source code, by doing so Google gets their services onto as many devices as possible which is in the end what makes them money. Google has maintained throughout the sale process that they would be building a so called ‘firewall’ between the two companies and they would continue to operate independently of each other meaning that Motorola would have no early access to the source code of the latest Android OS nor would they receive preferential treatment.
According to the Wall Street Journal recently, in order to further nullify concerns from OEMs, Google will be looking to offer early access to the latest Android OS source code to multiple OEMs possibly paving the way for multiple ‘Nexus’ devices or at the very least devices running vanilla versions of Android, which would see manufacturers competing with each other on hardware design and specs rather than the ‘skins’ they currently use to differntiate their handsets.
I like the idea of vanilla Android devices but personally don`t see it happening. The OEMs are way to invested in their skins to give them up completely, they truly believe they give value to their devices. What I see happening is rather than waiting 6 months for devices to start appearing running the latest version of the OS we may see them a lot sooner after Google does their big announcement which is a bit of a win. But all this is speculation, we’ll have to wait and see what happens, it does mean we could see some cooler stuff at Google IO next month but it’s probably a bit early yet. What are your thoughts on what we could see out of the Google – Motorola purchase?
Thank god this got done, now google can produce their own product & hopefully get rid of the added expense of having Samsung make their phones so we can finally get an 8mb camera, a micro-sd card, 32mb of storeage & a great display.
Well letting others produce a phone for them could be more cost effective. After everything they said, they will be hit by some anti-competitive stuff if they just let moto manufacture a Nexus device while not being able to beat the likes of Samsung,HTC etc. fair and square.
Don’t think we’ll see a micro-sd card in future nexus devices unless google change their stance on this or find a solution to achieve what they wanted the UI to do
http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/11/19/galaxy.nexus.follows.ios.model.of.unified.storage/H
wtf would the build a firewall between the 2 companies? Last time I looked moto was losing money and doing a great job at that. They need all the help Google can give them. Hopefully that means google will change a few of their policies (encrypted bootloader and blur first please google).
I just dont see it as good business sense to buy a struggling company that is losing money and let it keep running as it has been (i know its about the patents but it should be more than that- this could be awesome)….
Absolutely no idea, but it seems they have to alleviate the fears of all the rest of the OHA members. I still put money on a Huawei Ascend Nexus(Bribe to China to push through the purchase). It could be a really cool sale in terms of the hardware they could create, Motorola Mobility also are a leader in cable boxes, so we could see some awesome Google TV boxes etc coming out. Not to mention Google Glasses!!
Well, all Google cared about when buying Motorola, was the many patents they will acquire along with it as well as stop Moto from suing other Android manufacturers without Google’s permission.
They don’t want to lose money when other manufacturers think they are giving motorola a preferential treatment. Letting Moto go on as in has everything to do with not wanting to upset other companies like Samsung, HTC, LG etc.