0
Motorola's creations stretch from a pioneering walkie-talkie to the first cell phone.
Motorola founders Paul Galvin (left) and Joseph Galvin
When Google agreed to buy Motorola Mobility, it bid for a company that predates it by 70 years.
Brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928, based in Chicago. Their first product was a battery eliminator, a power converter that allowed battery-powered radios to be plugged into household electrical outlets.
The company soon began to try its hand at revolutionizing the radio itself, putting radios in everything from cars to backpacks to hands. Three-quarters of a century and one name change later, Motorola has amassed 17,000 patents and developed some truly groundbreaking technology.
The Handie-Talkie
2 of 8
A World War II era Handie-Talkie in a 1992 MicroTAC cell phone advertisement
In 1940, Galvin Manufacturing (the company didn't become known as Motorola until 1947) invented the "Handie-Talkie."
As America geared up for combat in World War II, company engineers predicted that soldiers would need a way to communicate with one another while on foot. At the time, the only radios the Army traveled with were installed in Jeeps.
Galvin's solution was a portable, two-way AM radio that was battery-powered. The "Handie-Talkie" was limited to a range of just one mile, but it became widely used during World War II.
The walkie-talkie
3 of 8
The walkie-talkie debuted in 1943 as the first FM portable two-way radio. It was used by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. during World War II.
It weighted 35 lbs., so it had to be worn on a backpack. But all that heft was necessary to give the device a range of 10 to 20 miles. Portable AM radios, though able to be built much smaller, couldn't be used for long-distance communication.
The first cell phone
4 of 8
Motorola debuted the DynaTAC 8000X in 1983, the first portable cellular phone for consumer use.
Better known as the phone that Gordon Gekko carried (lugged?) around in the 1987 movie Wall Street, the DynaTAC weighed 1 lb., 12 oz.
Motorola actually invented the DynaTAC 10 years before it reached store shelves. But the company also had to develop and build out the cell tower infrastructure that made mobile phone calls possible.
StarTAC
5 of 8
The StarTAC cell phone, introduced in 1996, wasn't merely the smallest and lightest mobile phone at the time -- it's small and light by today's standards, 15 years later.
Marketed as the first "wearable" phone, the StarTAC weighed just 3.1 oz.; the iPhone 4 weighs 4.8 oz.
Granted, modern smartphones can do quite a bit more than the StarTAC. Today's mobile devices can become Wi-Fi hotspots, providing laptops with Internet speeds of up to 12 megabits per second (about the same as a home broadband line). The StarTAC could also be tethered to a laptop, providing up to 9.6 kilobits per second -- about 1/6 the speed of a 56k dial-up modem.
RAZR
6 of 8
Until the iPhone passed it in the second quarter of 2011, the Motorola RAZR had been the best-selling cell phone of all time.
Motorola debuted the ultra-thin flip phone in 2004. It immediately smashed through sales records and remained the top-selling cell phone for 12-straight quarters.
Its run came to a screeching halt in the third quarter of 2007, when Apple debuted the iPhone.
But during its streak, RAZR flew off the shelves faster than the iPhone: Motorola sold 110 million RAZR's in three years. It took Apple four years to sell as many iPhones.
Droid
7 of 8
After the RAZR, Motorola went into a bit of a funk, debuting flop after flop. That changed with the November 2009 debut of the Droid.
Motorola opted to partner with Google's Android team to put the then largely unknown operating system on its new smartphone. With a powerful "Droid Does" advertising campaign by Verizon Wireless, the Droid was the first commercially successful Android device.
The Droid's first quarter of sales was even more successful than the iPhone's. But smartphone success beyond the Droid has varied. Motorola is now selling its third-iteration of the successful Droid line, but sales of the promising Atrix device have faltered, and Motorola has suffered delays in getting eagerly anticipated devices like the Bionic on store shelves.
Xoom
Motorola partnered with Google again this year to develop the Xoom, the first tablet for Google's new "Honeycomb" version of its Android operating system.
But sales have been dreadful. Motorola sold just 440,000 Xoom tablets during the second quarter, compared to more than 9 million iPads over the same three-month period.
