Meet Android, the Google Phone’s Robot Brain
As expected, Google announced the details about its much-rumored mobile phone strategy Monday morning.
Many people were expecting a piece of hardware to be announced, but as we guessed last week, there’s no hardware yet. The "GPhone" isn’t a phone at all. It’s a mobile operating system called Android. Based on Linux, Android provides an open platform for developers to create their own applications for a wide range of mobile devices. So Google isn’t building a better iPhone. It’s building a better Windows Mobile — a compact (and free) operating system and a suite of basic productivity apps for smartphones. Also, we can anticipate that the mobile OS will ship already optimized to run GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps and other Gapps.
Android’s Andy Rubin says we’ll see an SDK in about a week, and we’re still gathering details beyond that. For now, here’s a video showing members of Google’s Andriod team pumping the new OS.
At one point, you’ll see an engineer position the open-source Android development as "kind of similar to what’s happening on the internet." I’d disagree and say it’s closer to what’s happening with the iPhone. Except legit, open-source and with the backing of over a dozen major corporations. Or maybe it’s closer to what’s happening with the other free mobile OS, OpenMoko.
Android and OpenMoko seem to have a lot in common. For example, neither of them can make phone calls yet.
