Google Inc. made a $12.5 billion deal to buy Motorola’s mobile phone division, a move that could reshape the Internet giant’s future in the mobile world while also giving it an arsenal of patents for a real legal war with Apple.
The purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., by far the largest in Google’s history, moves the Internet company into the arena of making smartphones, tablet computers and cable set-top boxes. It will nearly double Google’s work force and test the company’s young alliance with other cellphone makers.

If the driving motivation behind Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility was the company’s patent arsenal, the search giant isn’t seeing much return on that huge investment.

This week, Google’s Motorola division had yet another setback in its ongoing intellectual property dispute with Microsoft, when a judge dismissed some of the patent claims it had deposed against the software company.
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