Google Announces Android, an Open Source Operating System for Smartphones

[zyzhou]

No, Microsoft has already announced its competing product offering to Android. Working with a very small group of tight-lipped partners, Microsoft has already chosen the working name for its product: Paranoid.

lol

Microsoft made very slow progress in open source, so I think there won't be such alliance for Windows Mobile.

[Adama D. Brown]

No, Microsoft has already announced its competing product offering to Android. Working with a very small group of tight-lipped partners, Microsoft has already chosen the working name for its product: Paranoid.

And to complete this little round-robin, I hereby designate Palm Inc.'s OS project "Marvin."

[Fixup]

Has Google ever realized this?: for anything to work out in this country, they have to overcome the two evils first - ATT and VZ. ATT is no problem, because it is GSM, as simple as a SIM swapping. VZ is the real problem. VZ does not even allow any java and a phone's ESN must be in VZ's database. You can only use those phones allowed by VZ.

Motorola's dealing with VZ has been: leak hack stuff. Hopefully Moto will continue this trick with the Android so we can easily flash a VZ phone to the Android OS. Otherwise this whole thing is going to fail.

I heard that Google was trying to talk with VZ, but seems failed so far. It is interesting to watch how google deal with this problem. Unless google can beat VZ to pass a new regulation that VZ must allow any CDMA phone on its network, Android is got to fail in USA. No wonder WSJ published recently an article on this issue - how carriers decide which phones customers can use. Seems google already started this war in the help of Wall Street. Very interesting to watch this war.

[drmrbrewer]

This makes Android an OS for smartphones.

Out of interest, why only smartphones? Will this OS (or a variant of it) not be suitable also for non-phone handhelds, even if connectivity of some sort is required, e.g. wifi?

Mike

[Antoine Wright]

Out of interest, why only smartphones? Will this OS (or a variant of it) not be suitable also for non-phone handhelds, even if connectivity of some sort is required, e.g. wifi?

Mike

Google hasn't limited it to smartphones, but has not stated what other types of devices might use Andrioid either.

[holvoetn]

Google hasn't limited it to smartphones, but has not stated what other types of devices might use Andrioid either.

Knowing Google is behind this, I would think any device with Internet connectivity possibilities will be in the target zone. So theoretically a PDA with only WiFi access would also be possible.

Just my 0.02€

[drmrbrewer]

Thanks for the thoughts. It just seemed like everyone was considering this as being an "OS for smartphones"; personally I'm not terribly interested in buying into the smartphone concept, but if this were rolled out to PDAs then it would be a whole different matter...

Whatever, I bet the guys over at Palm are losing not just a little sleep. Not sure how much of the market will be left for them once they come out of their perpetual daydream.

Mike

[Ed Hardy]

While it will be possible to use Android on a non-smartphone mobile device, that's not its intended purpose. It's a side effect.

Any company planning to make a handheld running Android will have to work around the fact that many of the standard applications will require a connection to the Internet to do anything. Yes, you can get a connection through Wi-Fi, but this greatly limits the usefulness of apps like Google Maps.
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[drmrbrewer]

Seems to me like they'd reach a far greater audience by not making it awkward for makers of, and developers for, non-smartphone devices... i.e. making it one of the intended purposes rather than just a spurious side effect. I can't think of that many standard applications that would really *require* a cellphone type connection; you mention google maps but even without an automatically determined location, google maps is still useful (just type in the place name, or a postcode). And then there's wifi and gps. Would a device with wifi / gps / skype be called a smartphone?

Mike

[Adama D. Brown]

Seems to me like they'd reach a far greater audience by not making it awkward for makers of, and developers for, non-smartphone devices... i.e. making it one of the intended purposes rather than just a spurious side effect. I can't think of that many standard applications that would really *require* a cellphone type connection; you mention google maps but even without an automatically determined location, google maps is still useful (just type in the place name, or a postcode).

The point is that unless you had a wide-area connection, Google Maps would only work within range of a WiFi AP. That makes it basically useless for in-car navigation.