Motorola

Motorola

Motorola, Inc. ( /moʊtɵˈroʊlə/) was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company was divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011. Motorola Solutions is generally considered to be the direct successor to Motorola, Inc., as the reorganization was structured with Motorola Mobility being spun off.

Motorola designed and sold wireless network infrastructure equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers. Motorola's home and broadcast network products included set-top boxes, digital video recorders, and network equipment used to enable video broadcasting, computer telephony, and high-definition television. Its business and government customers consisted mainly of wireless voice and broadband systems (used to build private networks), and, public safety communications systems like Astro and Dimetra. These businesses (except for set-top boxes and cable modems) are now part of Motorola Solutions.

Motorola's wireless telephone handset division was a pioneer in cellular telephones. Known as the Personal Communication Sector (PCS) prior to 2004, it pioneered the "flip phone" with the MicroTAC – and, the "clam phone" with the StarTAC – in the mid-1990s. It had staged an enormously successful resurgence by the mid-2000s with the RAZR; but, lost significant market share in the second half of that decade. Lately, it has focused on smartphones using Google's open-source Android mobile operating system. The first phone to use the newest version of Google's open source OS, Android 2.0, was released on November 2, 2009 as the Motorola Droid (the GSM version launched a month later, in Europe, as the Motorola Milestone). The handset division, (along with cable set-top boxes and cable modems) has since then been spun off into the independent Motorola Mobility. On May 22, 2012, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google closed on its deal to acquire Motorola Mobility.