I just read this very interesting article claiming that Motorola out of the well publicized numer of 17,000 patents that they have, they only have 18 that might be valuable to Google. Although that might seem ridiculous, it might not be very far off. If you look at how many GSM essential patents are out there (the ones that get IPR money for handsets and network equipment and which numbers are publicly available), they were 561 with Motorola at that time having a share of 11% (companies like Nokia had 33% and Ericson 22%, Motorola was third and fourth was Qualcomm with 7%. So that is 61 patents. But that is GSM so possibly not relevant for 3G and the smartphone business and therefore Android. Now if we look at the numbers of the 3G WCDMA IPR distribution, we can see that there  are 1888 essential patents in the patent pool that covers 90% of the patents and Motorola share has dropped to 2%, so 37 patents. That might be more relevant for Android. On 3G, the bigger patent holder is Qualcomm (35% of the total pool) followed by Ericsson (16%) and Nokia (14%). Samsung (which is one of the companies that theoretically that acquisition protects, if not the most important one considering their leading Android market share) has actually 5% of the pool, more than Motorola. If we look at future, meaning, the LTE joint IPR share declaration from late 2010, Motorola does not show up on the top list lead by Interdigital (21%), Qualcomm (19%), Huawei (9%) and yes, Samsung (8%). Motorola is somewhere burried in the 22% of others (I do not have the breakdown for those but it has to be under 5% for anyone there. So whatever IPR Motorola holds, it seems to be not very large for present (3G) and future patent (LTE) patent pools and it seems smaller than Samsung, the main company that this deal is suppose to protect. If patents is all what interests Google, perhaps they should have bought Interdigital that is up for sale and currently trades at around $3BB market cap. Or perhaps there is more than patents.