Oh, it’s much more than a phone – it’s Google becoming the Operating System -vendor- benevolent dictator for the emerging dominant platform of this century – connected, portable devices.
It was clear Google was on the verge of announcing something, framing the conversation – but in retrospect, the framing was all around ‘platform’ of handsets.
A good bet – more handsets exist than personal computers in all parts of the world. and increasingly, these handsets are computing devices capable of running a true OS liek Linux.
So Motorola, HTC and others are in the game, as well as some major, major operators (China Telecom, T-Mobile, Telefonica).
Nokia (millions handsets a day sold!), RIM (embedded enterprise), Microsoft (already best friends with HTC) and Apple (nuff said) are not.
The real interest for me is how open, connected and usable the platform will be to develop applications onto.
So, now there’s SDKs for Java, Symbian, iPhone, MS Mobile and Google-led ‘Open Handset Alliance’, which is Linux/Java:
> “Mr. Rubin, who is 44 years old and is a veteran Silicon Valley designer, said the software system that Google has designed is based on the Linux operating system and Sun Microsystems’ Java language. It is designed so programmers can easily build applications that connect to independent Web services.”
I really want to focus on mobile devices as a delivery platform, but maybe that’s the point – focus on the content and connectedness – all these devices have great web browsers.