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.