Setbacks for Google's Android
The first phones using Google's Android platform were meant to go to market by the second half of this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, Google is facing some major setbacks thanks to the intricacies of the cell phone business.
Google had planned to launch the first Android handsets with the help of T-Mobile USA in the second half of this year. While this launch is still going forward as planned, the WSJ reports that T-Mobile is taking up so many of Google's resources that other partners such as Sprint will have to delay the launch of Android on their network. Thanks to this delay, Sprint is now even considering to delay the release of an Android phone until it has hardware available to run it on its 4G network instead.
In the international market, Google is also facing a number of problems. China Mobile apparently has problems translating the Android software into Chinese characters.
Unlike Apple, which put a lot of pressure on AT&T to retain control of both the hardware and software, Google is pursuing a different strategy by just providing the software platform and leaving everything else to the hardware manufacturers and network providers.
This news is definitely coming at a bad time for Google. Apple is set to release the next version of its iPhone on July 11th and a lot of buyers who were in the market for a modern smartphone and considered waiting for an Android phone might now move to an Apple or Blackberry device instead.
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"Spring is now even considering to delay the release of an Android phone until it has hardware available to run it on its 4G network instead."
Do you mean Sprint? I wasn't aware of any mobile vendors called "Spring".
'Spring' sounds a bit like a joint venture between Google and Sprint :)
Thanks for catching the typo.
Bloggers have simply overreacted and caused a huge stir about nothing through a game of "telephone":
http://phandroid.com/2008/06/23/android-delayed-depends-on-who-you-ask/
From last100:
Reading between the lines it looks as if Google’s Open Handset Alliance strategy may have inherited the worse aspects of both an open and closed platform. By releasing Android to developers, carriers and handset manufacturers as a ‘work in progress’, Google has raised expectations (since anything “broken” can still, in theory, be fixed), with each partner seemingly able to make their own demands on what the finished platform will look like. Worse still, if they don’t like the outcome, Android’s open-source license means that partners are at liberty to make any changes they see fit, not just cosmetic, including re-designing the UI and closing off access to parts of the operating system. It’s in this context that Apple’s more closed strategy and the Steve Jobs dictatorship doesn’t look so bad after all.
At the Google IO Conference, the keynote slides showed the serial number for an Android prototype:
ht818g200403