Android and the Open Handset Alliance.
Apple may have produced a great, polished and closed device in the iPhone. Revolutionary? Nope, but very impressive nevertheless. As a device, as a user interface and — soon — as a platform. Yet in some years from now, what will probably be the iPhone’s single most significant contribution to the world was the belief that sometime in 2007 or 2008 a single, competing device would come from the dominant player of our times, Google. A device called gPhone. It isn’t. It couldn’t be. Instead we got something Open. Open as in Open Source, open as in Open Standard. We got Android and the Open Handset Alliance.
They may — on the surface — be very similar to a number of existing open platforms for mobile devices, but there’s one, major difference: It’s got Google’s backing and along with it that of most of the leading manufacturing, service and research companies of this industry. nVidia, Qualcomm, SiRF, Synaptics, TI, Marvell, Intel, Broadcom, eBay, Samsung, Motorola, LG, HTC, T-Mobile, Sprint, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Google among others are all there. Something tells me that with proper coordination this can change the market in more ways than glossy UI widgets, animated lists can and a polished closed device could ever possibly do.
It’s got Google’s backing and along with it that of most of the leading manufacturing, service and research companies of this industry.
Well, NOT most of the leading handset manufacturers. Nokia and Sony-Ericsson are not in the list.
Who said anything about handset manufacturers? They are, if I may put it this way, irrelevant to the alliance, or — in other words — one of the reasons for its existence. Now, on the other hand, LG, Samsung and Intel, if anything, are amongst the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. At any rate, I can very easily see some of handset manufacturers embracing Android in the future, especially if it proves to be half as technically interesting as it seems to be. Time will tell whether the OHA going to succeed or not, but I think it has a lot going for it…