Besides the well known top dogs in the mobile world, like Nokia and SonyEricsson we had one of the newcomers in our video walk through, yesterday. But that newcomer Garnim did not need to step to far from his core business as they are big in the GPS-handheld-device market. So it’s not a big issue for the mobile industry to classify their market entry.
Google, on the other hand, is not predictable in many dimensions: Open platforms, like the mobile OS called android, they are developing within the Open Handset Alliance, will be released as open source in the future. The mobile network operator smiled at open source projects in the past – or ignored them. Sometimes they even worked against these projects. The control over the (mostly subsidized) handsets should be in the hands of the operator. With android, everything should change and users should gain control over their own phone – like they did with their personal computer. That threatens the operators who are afraid of dropping SMS and speech telephony revenues because of VoIP and IM-clients on the new open handsets. But there is a chance of generating new forms of revenues.
At the MWC Google and the CPU manufacturer ARM give a first impression in the look and feel of the new android user interface. Here is an android Video of a reference design phone. It is powered by an ARM processor and is quite fast in user interaction. The asianmanufacturer E28 just used android as his chance and ported android on one of it’s handsets for the Congress. Here also: quite fast screen animation speed.
As Apple’s iPhone, also android will really change the mobile world 😉
P.S. Deadline for the android Developer Challenge of Google awarding 10 Mio. $ in total is: April 14th 2008 😉