Android Released to the Wild

By Andrew Miller in Reader

Posted in Linux on October 23, 2008 at 12:25 pm

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Some of you may have noticed in the news this week, that Google has released the Android source code to the public. Already it has been ported to a few devices and that’s within only a matter of days. The general consensus from anyone (including myself) who has had any time with the G1 was that the hardware was nothing special and it was the operating system was what was most interesting.

I see a lot of mobile phones and on the surface some of them look great, and on a tick list, they even fit the bill nicely. What they lack in is the overall software experience - partly due to budget. There is only so much time you can spend getting the software right. Google Android would allow manufacturers to concentrate on getting the hardware right, then just put Android on and keep prices low. There are obvious monopolistic issues with this approach - but when something is open source, I question if it is a monopoly at all. There is also the issue that this could stifle innovation, but once again, you are free to modify the code in any way you like, or write your own extensions. I don’t think there is anything that suggests that extensions have to be released as open source - so there is still room for manufacturers to innovate and differentiate without fear of giving the competition a helping hand. Exciting times in the mobile industry.

I often see great technology and the conclusion I come to is that it will only be good if everyone is using it. In many respects, Monopolies really do help and who could argue against Open Source being a monopoly? The operating system is starting to become less and less important and at some point we’ll have to just settle on a standard and move on to the next issue.

This week has also seen the release of Google Gadgets for Linux. Still no Chrome for Linux (sigh) but this is still an important release as it marks complete cross platform compatibility. For those that haven’t seen Google Gadgets, it’s very similar to the Vista dock, with a host of pretty handy plugins such as Google Calendar and an RSS reader.

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