Google is selling Motorola to Lenovo, Project Ara and patents to stay with Google

[Misanthrope]

Regrettable, I liked the new direction they were taking. Just to throw another comment I saw elsewhere,  the timing seems particularly suspicious right after seeing how Samsung was locking down their line and going proprietary and all that, the other news of the days is that Samsung, out of the goodness of their hearths, decided to give up their planned new UI and likely align with default android?

I think Google wanted to align with Samsung instead of having them basically continue to fork Android into their own ecosystem and their request was "well, don't compete with us directly then, get rid of Motorola"

 

Which also (to go full tinfoil hat mode here) could have been the only reason Google kept Motorola alive anyway: They already had their patents anyhow but they wanted to make the point that they could sell Android without overblown specs or too much bloatware and third party UI and Apps. 

[dizmo]

I understand why Lenovo would want Motorola, they want to have a presence in the US smartphone market. It worries me though because Motorola was really starting to turn around and they had some good momentum building up, Now it becomes questionable whether that will continue under Lenovo especially since Lenovo hasn't really gotten anywhere with their own smartphones.

Lenovo does quite well with mobile phones...just not in North America. Which they don't even market to.

Motorola continues to operate at a loss, so they haven't really turned too much around. You can only be a leech so long before you get pulled off the source of money.

 

 

What will be interesting to see, is if they keep the US manufacturing facilities. I imagine it would be much cheaper to have them produced in China.