[Marseille]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Besides, perhaps Motorola's patents may just be a lot more valuable in this particular situation?

I suspected that wasn't true before, but the Times has confirmed it since

Originally Posted by NYTs

But all patents aren’t created equal. For a time, Palm’s products dominated the market for personal digital assistants, precursors to today’s smartphones. The company also later developed an innovative operating system for handsets.

So its patents sit in the mobile device sweet spot, whether related to displays, interfaces or other features. On average, those should be worth more than the wider range of Nortel’s or Motorola’s patents.

Also instructive is that Palm in its heyday appeared to enjoy needling Apple, though Apple was hesitant to take Palm to court. That suggests some important intellectual property leverage compared with, say, Motorola, a company Apple has sued. It’s difficult to value patent portfolios but it seems likely the one H.P. apparently paid a full price for is now worth a good bit more.

Now I gather that at least one of the 2 motorolas (who knows which) has patents that are also related to multimedia and could be beneficial to Google's other products, but as to the current trolls, Palm's patents would trump. They're tailor-made to defend against both MS and Apple.

I've mentioned elsewhere that Google should use Motorola's patents to leverage a larger patent trove: that of all the major Android manufacturers. It would work by Google offering licensing of Motorola patents to each in exchange for them offering common licensing of their own patents that would help fill in the gaps of the overall portfolio and make each of them bulletproof. Getting those manufacturers to offer licenses to their competition would be a tough sell, but I'm not convinced motorola's patents alone are going to end this. After all, Apple already sued motorola. At the very least, they weren't intimidated by that portfolio.