FEATURE ANDROID
there will never be an “Android experience” because of the diversity of products and the customisable nature of the platform— Choudhury argues that Android allows dif- ferent players in the value chain to make it their own. This includes the operator community and
Android’s popularity with carriers owes a great deal to the opportunities it affords to them to specify their own handsets. “The car- riers have an awful lot of say in how to modify and move Android forward,” says Choudhury, citing a number of key examples. The first and most important, he says, is China Mobile’s Ophone platform. The world’s largest carrier announced the
The suggestion has been made more than once that Android represents Google by stealth and the firm has been at pains to stress that this is not the case, mindful, no doubt, of Nokia’s struggles to position Symbian as a fully independent platform
Ophone platform in September 2009, with the first handsets hitting the market at the end of last year. China Mobile has reportedly signed up more than 20 vendors to develop handsets based on its customised Android platform and 20 models are expected to launch during 2010. Lenovo, HTC and LG all have Ophone devices that are either available or imminently so. The appeal to operators is understandable.
A level of control over handset specification is something that is seen as a benefit as they fight to position themselves to remain relevant in the mobile value chain. Very few carriers have the scale and resource to develop their own platforms in the way that Vodafone has with its 360 products and the fact that they can take advantage of the wealth of expertise from the companies involved in the development of the Android operating system is powerfully at- tractive. Android enables operators to develop a handset ‘experience’ in the same way that vendors do. As Huawei’s Glory Cheung puts it: “Android has reshaped the competitive land- scape in the mobile industry and is altering the role of the operator in the industry chain.” It’s never simple, though, and the trade off
in this instance is that the whole programme is run by Google, arguably the company that presents the single biggest threat to maintained operator relevance in the mobile internet space. But Google says it is not seeking to control what other companies do with the operating system. AT&T launched Motorola’s Backflip Android handset with Yahoo as the onboard search engine. Motorola itself announced recently that it intends to use the Bing search engine for all of its Chinese Android handsets that are not part of the Ophone project, which is probably just as well given Google’s current difficulties with the Chinese state.
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Google’s strategy with Android remains
the source of much debate, especially since the launch of its Nexus One handset earlier this year. Google’s control over the develop- ment of the hardware as well as the software extended to the firm specifying the position of the home key on the handset and represented a much anticipated move into a new space, although the phone was manufactured by Android pioneer HTC. The suggestion has been made more than
once that Android represents Google by stealth and the firm has been at pains to stress that this is not the case, mindful, no doubt, of Nokia’s struggles to position Symbian as a fully independent platform. (At MWC, Schmidt pledged not to favour Android in the devel- opment of its services, promising to treat all operating systems with parity.) So the arrival of the Nexus One was interpreted by some as the result of Google’s frustration with existing Android products, and the extent to which they were showcasing the firm’s capabilities to develop compelling mobile web services. Prior to the Nexus One, says Informa
analyst Jamie Moss, “Android phones were not getting the rave reviews that Google was hoping for, especially as the end user experi- ence was being endlessly compared with the iPhone. So despite all the enthusiasm about Android, I think Google were concerned that the operating system’s reputation would become damaged before it had a chance to really get going.” Moss suggests that Google’s handset play
sees it looking to take a leaf out of the books of the likes of RIM and Apple and their tightly controlled strategy. “If the iPhone and the Blackberry can teach the handset market anything, it’s that tightness of integration between hardware, operating system and user interface is key to delivering the best possible end user experience,” he says. “The ‘problem’ with Android phones arguably lay in the in- tegration of the OS with the hardware. This was being done by the OEM, meaning that the OS developer was losing control of the user experience that they were designing. “I think Google wanted to prove how
good an experience Android could provide and set about achieving this by integrat- ing the OS themselves and getting an OEM to make a device for them. As a software developer they are probably in the best position to do the integration—and are likely to be able to get the best possible performance out of the OS,” he says. »
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