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What is Motorola?
Motorola was an American telecommunications company founded in 1928 by Paul and Joseph Galvin as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. The company’s first product was a battery eliminator, a device that converted direct current to alternating current, allowing battery-powered radios to function through household electricity. Since early years, the company worked on radio communication devices. In 1940, it introduced a pair of two-way radio communication products for the US police and military personnel.
In 1962, Motorola also started supplying radio communications gear for the unmanned Mariner and manned Gemini space programmes. The company’s transponder was in 1969 used in America’s first Moon exploration mission, Apollo, where astronaut Neil Armstrong’s message from the moon was carried over a Motorola-designed device.
Besides radio communication products, Motorola also produced wireless network equipment and home and broadcast network products, such as set-top boxes, digital video recorders, high-definition television, etc. Motorola's wireless telephone handset division was a pioneer in cellular telephones. The company introduced the concept of mobile phones, flip phones and clam phones in the mid-1990s. It was also among the first to build smartphones with Google's open-source Android mobile operating system. The first phone with the Android OS was released on November 2, 2009, as the Motorola Droid.
In 2011, the company was divided into two independent public entities — Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Motorola Mobility, which included handset division, was sold to Google in 2012. In 2014, Motorola Mobility was acquired by Chinese technology company Lenovo for $2.91 billion. As part of the deal, Google retained a majority ownership of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, while Lenovo received a licence to the portfolio of patents and other intellectual property.