Google should buy Motorola phone division

Google is bidding for spectrum. Google bought Android. Motorola handset division is up for grabs. Google should buy it. None of the financial pages have mentioned the idea, so it must be impossible for some reason. Remember, you heard it here first. I think the googlies are thinking the same thing about the future of phones as I am, which is that the hardware will eventually be a commodity item like x86-compatible hardware, and the software will go from being bloated offensive offal such as offered by Microsoft and cell-phone vendors to being embedded Linux (or equivalent) based. Cell phones are today where personal computers were in the pre- and early-PC era. Vendors with non-standard hardware running proprietary software. MSFT was able to emerge as a standard for a while for two reasons:

1. Because Apple refused to let their hardware be cloned and turn into a software company. If they had ported their system (now Free Software [Mach Microkernel and a BSD Unix server] under the hood) to x86 hardware, they possibly could have smashed MSFT.
2. Because ATT kept a death-grip on Unix, trying (and probably largely failing) to make money from their "intellectual property" and thus preventing the appearance of a decent affordable operating system on x86 hardware until 386-BSD and Linux appeared.

Eventually, probably within five years, phones running a standard, Free Software-based operating system will be widely available, and hopefully ports of this system will be made for reflashable devices such as my Nokia 6133 (the hardware isn't bad, and the software is the sort of trash that only sells to captive audiences, much worse than the software on the Nokia 3650 I bought years ago). [The 6133 is a 6131 with Bad Software made even worse by being crippled and hacked by T-Mobile, but this at least is fixable]. Regardless of what Nokia does, Asia will churn out handsets that run this platform. Symbian will go the way of CP/M and MSDOS. Nokia might go the way of Apple, except that it was the superiority of Apple software that kept them alive, so Nokia will go bust if their hardware doesn't run whatever the emerging standard turns out to be. Their acquisition of Trolltech may indicate that they see this, and will try to push some proprietary QT-based interface on their hardware to compete with a QT or GTK-based interface on the "PC-clone" phones of the near future.