Androids

Android. No longer just a robotic cyberman, but now a mobile phone operating system thanks to Google.

Ever since Apple released the iPhone with its plethora of Google enabled services acting behind the scenes, including the popular Google maps with the Apple designed interface, there has been a lot of noise about a “Google Phone” being ‘in-development’ with various Photoshop mock-ups of what the “gPhone” might look like.

What Google did instead though was announce it was developing an Open-Source mobile operating system, much like Microsoft’s “Mobile” OS strategy, that could be loaded onto a number of handsets and provide the same plethora of applications and more, thanks to the open source availability of the code, allowing developers to, well, develop new and interesting applications that will work right there on the Android OS.

Last week, at the Google conference the Android OS was shown off to a crowd. The stand-out feature reported was the inclusion of a digital compass, build into the device, which when used with Google Maps, allowed the maps to be rotated to the user’s point of view, so that when following directions, the map accurately reflected what the user should see in front of them. It’s a clever idea, but it’s something that SatNav companies have successfully done before using their mapping technologies and I’m not sure if it’s the “ultimate app” that will make people sign up and buy a “Google Phone”.

Whilst I don’t want to count the Android OS out just yet, I’m left wondering if this can ever be as popular as the Microsoft Mobile OS. The Microsoft model has a direct line back into its desktop OS and is able to interact with the magic Microsoft Office applications that most users will used for their Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, Google of course have their “Google Apps” (formerly known as “Docs and Spreadsheets”), but whether than can breakdown further the MS Office strong hold remains to be seen. That said, the iPhone doesn’t offer any way to create and edit documents either, so I could be wrong about what users really want to do on their mobile devices.

I expect the Android OS to take its share of the market – no doubt about that – especially amongst those users who shun Microsoft products and a percentage of developers will relish the chance to customise their handsets to work exactly how they would like them to (it’d be interesting to see what type of support Google will offer when applications go wrong and how that will work).

It’ll be exciting when it arrives, and people will buy – but will it ultimately dominate the mobile OS market – well, no one manufacturer has managed to do that as of yet.