With Motorola sale, Google unloads a headache

By selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, Google is ending a combination that never really worked out while keeping assets that could prove valuable down the road.

In a deal announced on Wednesday, Lenovo agreed to buy the venerable handset maker for US$2.91 billion, pending regulatory approval. That’s far less than the $12.5 billion that Google paid for Motorola in 2011, even counting what it already got for selling off the company’s set-top-box business. But Google will retain most of Motorola’s patents, potentially a valuable warchest in the lawsuit-strewn mobile industry.