Google gPhone is Really an Android - Meeting the Challenge
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The web site for the Open Handset Alliance gives a list of frequently asked questions in which it explains why the alliance is a good thing. The FAQ states that an open platform is good for consumers, mobile operators, handset manufacturers, semiconductor companies (Intel is part of the alliance), software companies, and developers. But not everyone agrees. And some have been fighting back.
Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo are investing in open source software on their own; they co-founded the LiMo Foundation. Symbian already boasts one of the largest mobile developer communities, with more than 75,000 registered developers – and it just dropped the fee to register applications to $20, from several hundred dollars. Both Motorola and Nokia are releasing new software tools for their phones to encourage third-party development.
While open source movements often end up strong, they take time to get traction. Rubin pointed out in his blog entry on Google’s site that the changes the alliance hopes to achieve “will take patience and much investment by the various players before you’ll see the first benefits…If you’re a mobile user, you’ll have to wait a little longer, but some of our partners are targeting the second half of 2008 to ship phones based on the Android platform.”
Of course, many users may never want or need an Android phone. That’s one reason why Google is continuing its other mobile initiatives, such as Google Maps and Gmail for the mobile phone. It plans to develop more applications as part of this initiative as well.
Whether the mobile applications are free add-ons from Google or were created by third-party developers to work with Android, however, you can expect that anything free will eventually be paid for by some kind of Google-connected advertising. Whether enough consumers are willing to accept advertising with their cell phones – and whether enough carriers and handset makers will settle for the percentage of the revenue that Google is willing to share – to make this work, remains to be seen. Analyst Ken Dulaney at Gartner maintains that “Building an OS is the dumbest thing [Google] could do.” Time will tell whether the markets agree.
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