Google Buys Motorola for $12.5 Billion

Deal gives Google a guaranteed platform for Android OS, further world domination.

Google has handed over $12.5 billion to buy Motorola Mobile in the web giant's biggest and boldest purchase yet. The move gives Google all the hardware it'll ever need to run its Android operating system for smartphones, which Motorola had been incorporating in its products since the system's launch two years ago. Needless to say, this has upped the stakes in the cutthroat mobile market, what with Research In Motion's BlackBerry lineup fighting to get back some of the market share it's lost to Android- and Apple-based smartphones, and Apple continuing as the ever-fattening 800-lb. gorilla in the room. Motorola, based out of Chicago, has been kicking around in one form or another since 1928, and was the first American company to land a patent for a commercial cellular phone, waaaaay back in 1983. It also invented the world's first two-way pager in 1995, which was like texting but a lot more complicated.