Google introduced their entry into the mobile phone world 11/5/07 with the gPhone. The gPhone will not be a piece of hardware with standard mobile service, but a software platform and operating system on an open platform called Android running Linux that can run mobile Google apps and programs from developers. Google has created the software to run a cellphone and is licensing this to 34 mobile phone handset makers and cell providers including T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel, NTT Docomo, China Mobile, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Qualcomm, Intel.
Notably absent from this mobile consortium are Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, or Nokia (which has its own Ovi mobile development platform).
“This is not an announcement of a Gphone. We hope thousands of different phones will be powered by Android. This will make possible all sorts of applications that have never been made available on a mobile device.” The software development kit will be available on November 12, but this announcement really falls short of expectations.
Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google thinks a lack of a collaborative effort is what has been keeping back the mobile Web. Android will help developers reduce complexities and costs across different mobile devices, very similar to the OpenSocial software foundation Google announced for web based social networks. Predictably, Android and OpenSocial will work seamlessly together, just like Microsoft Windows and Office software.
Google really tried to sugar coat this announcement, but quite soon we may be seeing another result of Google’s application development framework: monopoly.
The Gphone is the hot topic of the blogosphere today. Read more from the Google conference call here.
3 Responses
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what about the fact that my home alarm system needs to be hooked up to a landline, along with all the receivers i have with dish network