Motorola, Inc.

Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation and was renamed Motorola in 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been radio-related communication equipment such as two-way radios, consumer walkie-talkies, cellular infrastructure, mobile phones, satellite communicators, pagers, as well as cable modems and semiconductors. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, Motorola was split into two independent public companies: Motorola Solutions (its legal successor) and Motorola Mobility (spun off), on January 4, 2011. Motorola designed and sold wireless network equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers. 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. 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. These businesses, except for set-top boxes and cable modems, became part of Motorola Solutions after the split of Motorola in 2011. Motorola's wireless telephone handset division was a pioneer in cellular telephones. Also known as the Personal Communication Sector (PCS) prior to 2004, it pioneered the first mobile phone with the Motorola DynaTAC in 1983, followed by the more compact MicroTAC and the clamshell StarTAC in the 1990s. It had staged a resurgence by the mid-2000s with the RAZR, but lost market share in the second half of that decade, as the company's one-hit wonders were not enough to reinstate Motorola as a leader. Later it focused on smartphones using Google's Android mobile operating system, the first released product being Motorola Droid in 2009. The handset division was later spun off into Motorola Mobility.