As the dust settles from yesterday’s sudden announcement that Lenovo will purchase Motorola from Google for close to US$3 billion, it seems that not all parts of Motorola will be making the move over to Lenovo.
In a conference call overnight, Lenovo confirmed that the Advanced Technology and Projects Group – currently under the stewardship of former DARPA director Regina Dugan – will not be included within the sale of Motorola. Instead, this group will be making the move from Motorola’s Sunnyvale HQ to Google’s Mountain View complex and will be integrated with Google’s Android team. The team will report to Sundar Pichai, but maintain a more independent role.
The Advanced Technology and Projects group’s most recent and notable project is Project Ara, in the hopes of producing a “modular” phone that allows different phone configurations to be created based on the selection of various interchangeable parts. It is believed the plan is to use Google’s scale and various other resources to accelerate the project while continuing development of other ideas like biotech sensors and security tattoos.
Google has also confirmed that it will keep patents developed in the Advanced Technology Group, though Google has allowed Lenovo a license to use these patents.
Do you think the Advanced Technology and Project is a good fit with Google’s Android Team? Will Google accelerate Project Ara and bring it to the public faster? Let us know in the comments!
The plan is to use Google’s scale and resources to accelerate the project, as well as other wild ideas like security tattoos and other biotech sensors.
Hardware is constantly an issue for the Google android handsets it lowers the
performance because of different hardware and software support. This news
will definitely enhanced the services and development process while main
developers are getting with Google team for further development process .
The hardware/sales part of Motorola never seemed like a good fit with Google as shown by the very long gestation period before any “Google” phones came out of Motorola.There are some distant parallels with Microsoft’s failures with hardware sales which dogged MS for years. So that part of Google’s purchase looks like a serious fail. Especially so when looking at the huge financial write down on the sale. Even so they look like they got out just in time before Motorola was run into the ground. Keeping the experimental team is very good news for Android because this is where… Read more »
There is a long gestation period for any phone. You can’t just start selling a phone straight away.
Motorola is still a great brand, the droid line and the new moto line has gotten a lot of attention largely.
Did Google ever intend to keep Motorola? The price seems in the ball park for other patent auctions.