IP Democracy: Google Aims to Open Phones with Android

While I was grappling with a truly bad web hosting provider, the world became consumed with Google's official move into the heart of the mobile telephony business and, no, its not the much-rumored GPhone exactly. The company announced this morning an open platform for mobile phones called Android.

Details are a bit fuzzy because Android is still more concept than product, but the open platform is designed to allow thousands of developers to create their own applications through something called the Open Handset Alliance. The Alliance features a who's who in the mobile telephony world, with a few notable exceptions. Included are Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia, NTTDoCoMo, LG Electronics, Motorola, Samsung and dozens of other key carriers and tech providers.

Conspicuously missing from the Alliance are Verizon Wireless and AT&T, the top two mobile providers in the U.S. Verizon is firmly entrenched in its position that "open" phones are a threat and AT&T has a successful deal with Apple to sell the iPhone, which is as closed and proprietary as they come...for now.

The New York Times got the scoop on Android, which was developed by robot-fetishist Andy Rubin, Director of Mobile Platforms at Google. Rubin talks about the open framework on Google's Official Blog and says that he hopes Android will be "the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users."

Don't look for radical new changes in the mobile telephony market any time soon, however. Android is a conceptual shift in mobile telephony and Rubin warns that it is "one which will take patience and much investment by the various players before you'll see the first benefits."

Google is all about being "open" these days. Last week the search giant shook up the tech sector (and set bloggers to major buzzing) when it announced OpenSocial, its new open platform to create social networking applications, a major competitive reaction to Facebook's decision to take an investment stake from Microsoft.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 5, 2007 1:46 PM to IP Democracy