Motorola Mobility

Motorola Mobility is an American mobile device computer technology company, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The company was formed on January 4, 2011 by the split of Motorola Inc. into two separate companies; Motorola Mobility took on the company's consumer-oriented product lines, including its mobile phone business and its cable modems and set-top boxes for digital cable and satellite television services, while Motorola Solutions retained the company's enterprise-oriented product lines. It is a subsidiary of the Chinese personal computer and mobile device maker Lenovo.The company primarily manufactures smartphones and other mobile devices running the Android operating system developed by Google Inc.; in August 2011, only several months after the split, Google announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion. Google's stated intent for the purchase was to gain control of Motorola Mobility's portfolio of patents, so it could adequately protect other Android vendors from lawsuits. The deal closed in May 2012, after which it also sold its cable modem and set-top box business to Arris Group. Under Google ownership, Motorola Mobility increased its focus on the entry-level smartphone market, introduced one of the first Android Wear smartwatches, and also began development on Project Ara, a platform for modular smartphones with interchangeable components.Google's ownership of the company would be short-lived, as it announced in January 2014 that it would sell most of Motorola Mobility to Chinese personal computer and mobile device maker Lenovo for $2.91 billion. The sale, which excluded all but 2000 of Motorola Mobility's patents and the team working on Project Ara (which became part of the main Android development staff), was completed on October 30, 2014. Lenovo disclosed an intent to use its purchase of Motorola Mobility as a way to expand into the U.S. smartphone market.