Android sucks oxygen from mobile broadband room
Summary: Handset makers are used to having new product out every three months and tend to render it obsolete within six months. The carriers' wait for something that can compete with the iPhone has been excruciating. If other handheld operating system vendors don't step up soon, Android may be all that's left.
Just a week after launch the Google Android design is already sucking the oxygen from the mobile broadband market room.
Palm and Symbian are gasping for breath. Microsoft and LiMo are breathing hard. RIM seems to be holding its breath. Only Apple is still smiling.
Palm is under increased pressure to quit the mobile operating system race and throw in with Android. Nokia is now thinking of going along with Motorola and releasing Android kit. The Blackberry remains a narrow-band device.
Both Matt and I offered some snark against Microsoft yesterday, and the LiMo SDK is not coming out until year-end.
What makes the market potentially competitive is the fact that AT&T and Apple now define the handheld broadband experience. Other carriers are desperate to compete. So are other handset makers.
Google is demonstrating its own Android applications and dealers are appearing before users can even get their hands on devices.
Handset makers are used to having new product out every three months and tend to render it obsolete within six months. The carriers' wait for something that can compete with the iPhone has been excruciating.
If other handheld operating system vendors don't step up soon, Android may be all that's left.
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
any other Carriers?
Once Android is being used on other carriers, than I'll look into it, but right now, T-Mobile is by far the worst carrier in the U.S.
So buy the offerend contract free phone and go AT&T.
TripleII
Noteworthy: Nokia to take on Apple in music, touch-screen phones
That's today Dana. Jump on it.
First time I would ever say that an author
Sorry, but from all accounts Android is sucking very little from the room. Unlike the iPhone, this has been viewed as just another T-Mobile phone.
Though I do hope the article helps with a long a steady stream of income in terms of responses.
We understand that you HATE all of the excitement of Android and how great
I didn't think Android was much until now
I'm really just raising the alarm here. Note the last sentence, please. The other competitors need to step up to the plate soon because the handset makers and competing carriers need relief from Apple now.
Google is offering that relief. Open source is offering it to anyone.
Who else is there?
You mean aside from the...
Plus, of course, Nokia's acquisition and opening up of Symbian.
Just using the first two word of your title would have been considerably more accurate.
Hey, he's always good for a laugh or two though...
Cool but what about Qt Extended and OpenMoko?
Nokia isnt only investing in Symbian, it bought Trolltech, developer of Qtopia YET ANOTHER open source operating system for smartphones that nobody seems to have heard about. And after months of development and adjusting things to it, they just released the new version of it called Qt Extended 4.4
http://trolltech.com/products/device-creation/qt-extended/qt-extended-4.4-release
So maybe the whole fuss about Nokia having Android developers isnt really to bet on the Android but to spy on it to take stuff into Qt Extended (both of them are open source after all so it would be legal to simply copy stuff from one to the other). As we can see in the demo video for the current Qt Extended 4.4 release not only does it run in HTC, FIC's infamous OpenMoko and more devices but the gui seems pretty familiar, Im sure they didnt come up with those rolling windows idea themselves.
On the other hand for the true open source connoisseur Android is nothing more than a pretentious wannabe that stops half way. The great advantage about open source in the mobile world is not only for you to be able to mod your operating system all you want but for you to be able to mod all your phone with it, thats what FIC's Openmoko has accomplished so far. True they are far behind in the functional Operating System extravaganza but the whole phone is Open Source itself so you can pretty much install whatever you want on it as long as you have the source to compile it for the phone(like Android, Debian, Gentoo, Qt Extended, or its own operating system's current release 2008.09). So although the phone's system is lacking in many ways when you buy the phone your not married to the system but only the hardware(which with GPS, WIFI, Touchscreen, QVGA, A2DP Bluetooth, MicroSD, accelerometers, 3D Acceleration, and more; is fairly competitive against the rest out there).
So I think Google's android is specifically aiming at a market right in between truly open source where FICs Openmoko lies and the opposite end Apples fully commercial Iphone. Trying to figure out how to make the best out of open source while also trying to compete commercially against the Iphone(something that Openmoko will never do). What will really happen with the Android? I guess we really will have to wait since I do think you are exaggerating about your post since only the geek gadget guys truly know about Android but everyone knows about the Iphone.
Cheers
SrCuervo
You have to get it into production
OpenMoko has not yet met that test. Unfortunately, because I think well of them.
But one of them has already BEEN in production for 3 YEARS...!
I happen to know this because I happen to have a phone that sports QT Core as it's OS. It's called the Motorola A1200 Ming. It got it's FCC cert back in November 2005, was released originally in Asia and finally brought here in Jan 2007.
Motorola's original plan for the A1200 was to let it live in Asia only - but it's hard to keep a great phone a secret for very long. By November of 2006, with ZERO advertising in the US, it was the #2 search item in the cell phone catagory in the US. The only phone that was more popular at that point was the black RAZR. Until Jan 2007, they were imported by way of the gray market and sold as unlocked GSM phones.
If memory serves me correctly, most of Motorola's other Linux based phones also run some flavor of this OS.
*** LATE BREAKING NEWS ***
Details at 11.
RE: Android sucks oxygen from mobile broadband room
In respect of these facts, why should Nokia rush to try and compete with either of them? And why should Symbian as a platform feel threatened? Especially with its recent moves towards open source only likely to strengthen its position.
It'll be interesting to see how Google's Android progresses, but one thing is for sure its not going to oust Symbian anytime soon.
RE: Android sucks oxygen from mobile broadband room
Rarely has to be done very "soon"
But it's hardly ever that way. Just doing it eventually and well, usually works just fine.
Take Apple. Their first phone, the ROKR, failed. Did they do something "soon" about it? No, they spent a few years and came up with the iPhone.
RE: Android sucks oxygen from mobile broadband room
Android is nowhere beyond one carrier in the US Android has reached nowhere. I bet Google cannot beat Nokia in markets like India and China and if and when they do succed sould any of the language in this post be used again.