Google muscles up with Motorola Mobility

Google will buy mobile phone and electronics maker Motorola Mobility for a cool US$12.5 billion cash. The move is said to be intended to give Google an assist in fighting off patent lawsuits from other smartphone and mobile computing giants. Motorola it is noted owns no fewer than 17,000 patents with another 7,500 pending. Besides being by far the largest deal that Google has ever proposed, buying Motorola would push the company into phone and computer tablet manufacturing for the first time, at the risk of alienating the other device makers that depend on Google's Android operating system.