The Internet company has announced it has the intention to offer mobile phones users a free software system that will help them to easily surf the Internet. This new system will allow most of the mobile phones to work more like tiny computers.
Practically, the announcement that Google has made last week represents a crucial point in both mobile phone and computer’s history.
Of course Google is trying to expand its dominance behind the Internet in the mobile phones markets. But the decision is beneficial for users. Thanks to such a system there won’t be the same challenges for the users to navigate the Web through mobile phones. Secondly, the mobile phones industry will be encouraged to liberalize what the users are allowed to do with their mobile phones. And this way, the more free and satisfied the users will feel thanks to this new system, the greater the audience will be and the more potential advertising profit will come for Google and similar companies.
For this major project, Google has announced it has already partnered with almost three-dozen companies, which includes also T-Mobile, Motorola, Sprint Nextel and Qualcomm and others. They have all designed this system, which will become available to the software developers next week. Then in the second half of 2008, the customers will be able to try the system.
This recently announced move will have major implications in the mobile telephony industry and this is why not all of the companies that are supporting the project have also formally committed to using it.
Android, as the new technology has been codenamed, represents also part of Google’s attempt to force the wireless carriers and mobile phones makers to give up some of their control over which services and features the consumers can access with their mobile phones. Google’s software will also loosen some of the current restraints by allowing the companies to develop new services without needing the carriers’ permission. This way, new mobile features will quickly be created.
However, Google’s plans threaten Symbian and Microsoft’s
operating system for mobile phones. Although Symbian and Microsoft’s OS are currently
very popular, Google and its partners are hoping that freedom will bring them
more money that the current restrictions from this area.
"It's a step we've taken quite conscientiously, but we're betting that
giving customers the full array of what's available to them will be more
profitable than restricting them to the things we choose for them.” – Sprint’s
senior vice president of product development, John Garcia, has said.
Of course there are a lot of questions to be answered, but with Android a revolution is on its way to happen.