.Dust

There have been spec­u­la­tions around for months and at the end of day it is not a phone, it is a plat­form named Android.

Lot of inter­est­ing things about this.

First of all I would say this not really noth­ing com­pletely rev­o­lu­tion­ary for the mobile indus­try. Just check­ing my poor mem­ory make me think about LiMo, Open­Moko, Ubuntu Mobile, SavaJe and others.

The first dif­fer­ent thing here are the num­ber of com­pa­nies tak­ing part to this ini­tia­tive (34 accord­ing to the last count) and the qual­ity of them. (HTC, Sam­sung, LG, Motorola, Qual­com, Tele­com, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo and so on).

I think that this is also one of the big prob­lems that Google will need to sort out. Hav­ing on board these kind of com­pa­nies and in such a big num­ber may be painful and will, at least, take a lot of resources. We will see in the future what will hap­pen on this side. Any­way I am quite sur­prised about some names miss­ing on the list (guess who…)

If we look at the archi­tec­ture of what the plat­form should be we find that it will have a Linux ker­nel and will make use of Java for front end appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment. Again, noth­ing really new. The guys at SavaJe were doing this in a spec­tac­u­lar way ages before this came to light.

Two con­sid­er­a­tions. I think that the plat­form needed to run this kind of stuff will not be cheap in term of hard­ware resources and it will prob­a­bly will need two proces­sor for base­band and appli­ca­tions. This will make the price of the hard­ware not really cheap. I am not sure about this and I have recently seen chipsets grow­ing in pro­cess­ing power so this will need to be verified.

The Open Hand­set Alliance states that the prod­uct will be released under an Apache license. This is quite inter­est­ing even if I pre­sume that the linux ker­nel will need to stick with GPL because of its roots. The choice of this license will allow third party com­pa­nies to develop pro­pri­etary fea­tures and com­po­nents with­out the oblig­a­tion to share the deriv­a­tive work. This is one of the big dif­fer­ences between GPL and Apache licenses.

Prob­a­bly this was the only license avail­able to con­vince big com­pa­nies to develop on the plat­form since they will not be forced to dis­close their efforts to the community.

On Novem­ber 12^th and SDK will be released. It will be very inter­est­ing to see what will be in there.

When will prod­ucts will be avail­able with this plat­form? This is a dif­fi­cult ques­tion to answer but given the assump­tion that hand­set man­u­fac­ture were already work­ing with the plat­form in the last few months we may see some prod­ucts hit­ting the mar­ket in Q3/​Q4 2008.

There are also some inter­est­ing points in the Android description:

All appli­ca­tions are cre­ated equal
Android does not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the phone’s core appli­ca­tions and third-​party appli­ca­tions. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone’s capa­bil­i­ties pro­vid­ing users with a broad spec­trum of appli­ca­tions and ser­vices. With devices built on the Android Plat­form, users will be able to fully tai­lor the phone to their inter­ests. They can swap out the phone’s home­screen, the style of the dialer, or any of the appli­ca­tions. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo view­ing appli­ca­tion to han­dle the view­ing of all photos.

This is one of the most impor­tant things of the plat­forms and will prob­a­bly lead to inno­v­a­tive User Inter­faces, appli­ca­tions and ser­vices. This is were today mobile phone fails today. The abil­ity to choose which appli­ca­tion will be used for each task on the phone.

In some way a com­mon plat­form will lower the big issue of device frag­men­ta­tion. Devel­op­ers will be able to develop their appli­ca­tions and ser­vices with­out wor­ry­ing about the avail­abil­ity of fea­tures on each sin­gle plat­form. Well, I think they will have to worry form some­thing sim­i­lar but the core will be the same. This is a big relief for mobile appli­ca­tions developers.

Is the mar­ket ready for this? Def­i­nitely yes. I have read yes­ter­day that Sym­bian shipped 20.4 mil­lions of Sym­bian equipped smart­phones in Q3/​2007 with a 56% increase year over year. Side com­ment: it is quite inter­est­ing to note the fact that the aver­age roy­alty per unit went down from 5.2 USD to USD 4.8 in the same period.

I do not have yet any data on the num­bers of Microsoft Win­dows Mobile but I assume the same trend here. Pal­mOS is slight decreas­ing in pop­u­lar­ity and there are no other com­peti­tors in the mar­ket. We def­i­nitely need another player in this market.

Why do I blog this? Finally it seems that some­thing is chang­ing in the mobile world. It started from Apple with their iPhone, now Google is at the door, Nokia bought NavTeq, launched OVI and a music store. This is only the beginning.

Related posts:

1. My fat mobile phone
2. The Inter­net in your phone
3. Apple iPhone And The Yet To Be Announced Google Phone
4. Why Do Not We Stop Stuff­ing Mobile Phones?
5. Buy­ing music from a mobile phone