Google announced the establishment of the open handset alliance yesterday and also announced android, the free and open mobile platform. The alliance has more than 30 technology and mobile companies including most of the handset vendors and chip manufacturers and some of the operators as well. The mobile manufactuers as of now include Samsung, LG, Motorola and HTC.
Android would be based on Linux and would be made available for free to handset manufacturers. The developers will have access to the platform SDK and a number of tools using which they would be able to develop applications for the platform. Google would make available almost all of their applications as part of this software platform. Google plans to extend its monopoly of web search to mobile world as well and make money out of it.
Couple of key manufacturers missing as you might have noticed is Nokia and Sony-Ericsson. Nokia probably sees Android as a threat to the Symbian platform in which it has major stake and its Ovi services.
The first handset with Android software platform (software stack) is expected to be available in 2nd half of 2008. And the initial version of the SDK would be available on Nov 12th which the developers can download and start writing applications with.
Google further says that it would be willing to share the revenue from its search services with the operators though its not sure how much. However, this linux platform is yet one more addition to the linux based mobile platforms that have been existing till now which include LiMo.
Since the first handset based on Android wont be available till late next year, as a developer I would probably glance at the SDK that would be made available next week. And not spend too much time on it till I am convinced that this is not a pure PR exercise from Google.
Update: I wonder how much impact this would have on the IMS deployment by the operators.
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