Google has finally made a much-anticipated announcement regarding its mobile strategy. The centerpiece is Android, what Google is calling the “first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.”
As for all of those high profile partners we’ve been speculating about? Along with Google, they are forming the “Open Handset Alliance," which includes long-rumored cohorts T-Mobile, Motorola, Qualcomm, and HTC. There are already a total of 34 companies signed up for the alliance.
There is no actual “GPhone” device being manufactured by Google, as the early rumors suggested. However, the company does say that it expects manufacturers to begin shipping phones with the Android platform in the second half of next year, including a device from T-Mobile. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
"Today's announcement is more ambitious than any single 'Google Phone' that the press has been speculating about over the past few weeks. Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models."
Much like the plans Google announced last week for OpenSocial to be the platform upon which developers build social networking applications and add-ons, Android aspires to be the platform on top of which developers build mobile apps. The company plans to have a software developer kit (SDK) available for Android within “a week or so.”
Mobile applications have historically been a pain in the neck for developers to create, often requiring modifications for every device an application hoped to run on. OpenSocial seems to have pre-emptively stopped most of the major social networks from developing their own proprietary platforms, and it would appear Android hopes to do the same for the mobile space.
And just like that, Google is at the center of the social networking and mobile universes.