Google’s cellphone plans: Android

Google Inc. ended weeks of speculation about its mobile plans, unveiling an alliance of industry heavyweights centered on a new, open-source software platform.
The Internet behemoth joined Qualcomm Inc., Motorola Inc., HTC Corp. and T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom AG to take the wraps off the Open Handset Alliance, a 34-member group looking to spur innovation in mobile. The group introduced Android, a mobile software stack that consists of an operating system, middleware, a user interface and applications.
The Alliance said next week it will offer a software development kit (SDK), allowing developers to freely access the source code and tweak it for their own purposes. The idea, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is to give developers a new foundation upon which they can easily and cheaply build mobile applications.
“If you look at it, the key challenges in mobile have been the user interface . mobile developers face high costs and distribution issues,” Schmidt said during a press call outlining the effort. “No longer, if you are using Android as your platform, will you have to shoehorn, if you will, your application” to get it to work on mobile phones.
Interestingly, the company didn’t introduce a long-rumored “gPhone,” although executives effectively dodged when asked by reporters whether Google planned to offer a branded handset.
Android is the brainchild of Andy Rubin, who previously launched Silicon Valley’s Danger Inc., which produces the Hiptop device. Rubin came into the fold in 2005 when Google acquired Android Inc., another Rubin startup.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who serves as the company’s president of technology, said Android is an effort to bring to mobile the same kind of freedom developers have enjoyed for years on the Internet. Brin recounted his days as a graduate student at Stanford University, where a host of open source technologies allowed him and his students to create compelling applications.
“We were able to build really incredible things, because there as a set of tools that allows us to do that,” Brin said, mentioning Linux, Apache, HTP and HTML. “All those pieces and many more allowed us to do great new and innovative things, and distribute them to the whole world.”