Motorola

Motorola is a name that has been part of the mobile communications story for nearly a century. The company traces its roots to 1928, when brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago to make car radios. It was renamed Motorola in 1947, and over the following decades it became a global giant in two-way radios, pagers, satellite communicators, cellular infrastructure, cable modems and semiconductors, headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. Motorola's mobile phone legacy began in 1973, when engineer Martin Cooper and his team made the first handheld cellular call from a DynaTAC prototype, and in 1983 the company shipped the DynaTAC 8000X - the first commercial handheld mobile phone - kicking off the modern mobile era. The 1990s and 2000s brought iconic models such as the StarTAC, the RAZR V3 (a 2004 mega-hit with its thin clamshell design) and the Droid, which was among the first smartphones to run Android in 2010. After a difficult period that saw losses of over $4 billion between 2007 and 2009, Motorola was split into two independent companies on January 4, 2011: Motorola Solutions, which kept the professional and public-safety radio business, and Motorola Mobility, which continued the consumer smartphone and tablet line. In 2014, Chinese technology company Lenovo acquired Motorola Mobility for roughly $2.9 billion, and the brand has since operated as a Lenovo subsidiary, with design and research at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and manufacturing handled by Lenovo's supply chain. Under Lenovo, the brand was relaunched in 2020 with a new lowercase "motorola" identity and a broad portfolio of Android smartphones, including the mid-range moto g series, the flagship edge line, the ThinkPhone, and the RAZR foldables that revived the original clamshell form factor. Motorola phones run stock or lightly customized Android with Google services, and the company remains a notable player in the mid-range market, especially in North America and Latin America.