Google Paid HTC $1.1 Billion To Turn Itself Into a Phone Maker

Google will announce a number of new products on October 4, reportedly including two new phones, a smaller version of the Google Home, and a high-end laptop. And on Wednesday, the company announced an agreement with struggling manufacturer HTC that will import a team of engineers over to Google, to help close the gap between Mountain View's hardware ambitions and its present reality. The tie-up's not quite the acquisition that had been rumored, but rather a "cooperation agreement." Google is hiring a team of HTC employees--about 2,000 people in all, members of HTC's "Powered by HTC" division--most of whom have already been working on Google's Pixel phones. Those employees will stay in Taipei, Taiwan, where HTC is headquartered, but they'll become full-on Googlers. Both sides hope to close the deal by early 2018.