>You are thinking too much like a mobile industry guy.
That’s what I do best

Re: your three motivations for Google:
1. pull user analytics into AdSense and 3. implement click-to-call: both of these require Google to embed several key binary building blocks within the phone. As with Google YouTube, Gmail, etc apps, these are not in the source.android.com distro. The OEM has no incentive to include them as-is, other than through a commercial agreement (e.g. trade for Android Market, professional services support, ad rev share, etc) as per my earlier arguments

3. Both the Android and Chrome are based on WebKit, with the difference being in the JavaScript engine. So I don’t see why Chrome specifically and not another mobile-optimised WebKit variant. One reason of course is the consistency in rendering web apps, but I don’t know how well Chrome can be ported to mobile.

I also totally agree re: Google having commoditised location services and OS per-unit royalties.

Interesting times.

Andreas

Here are Google’s motivations, IMHO, for Android:
1. Incorporate end user mobile behavior into AdSense.
2. Push the bar for a good mobile browser so Google’s vision for Gears can be realized on mobiles. (This is why they built Chrome.)
3. Some day, evolve the click-through business model to click-to-call. You have to own the OS to pull this off.

They are bringing a huge pot of advertising money to the mobile industry and when they start distributing it, they will redirect the mobile industry to support their vision for computing. In the process, they are going to suck the money out of the value chain for location services & mobile OS licensing.

-Erick

Android is indeed missing a drag&drop UI development tool.

This would indeed make UI development easier, but still at an application level, and still addressed towards 3rd party developers.

What Android also needs to better address second parties (and variant management) is a tool for rapid core app development, like the ones licensed by TAT (Cascades) and Digital Airways (Kaleido). These tools/runtimes treat the entire UI (dialler, PIM, etc) not as a set of applications, but as a huge state machine, making designing the UI a task of designing screens and screen transitions, rather than individual app UIs.

Andreas

I would put the high browser usage of the G1 and iPhone down to three main factors; a) large screen with good-enough rendition of the full web b) flat data rates that encourage browsing behaviour c) the very demographic that buys iPhone and G1 devices who are already high spenders and quite likely connected individuals.

Charles,

Thanks, and great question to ask. Indeed, customer brand affinity is moving away from the handset brand to the service provider brand – in the US it’s already that way and in the rest of the world it’s becoming the way due to a) Apple and Google and b) handset brands becoming service provider brands also..

Andreas

The competitive landscape continues the shake-up from several years ago. The key question asked to a consumer, is “What’s your cell phone company?”

IPhone users say Apple, identifying with the equipment manufacturer and app store owner.

Android users say Google, identifying with the software stack and app store owner.

Most others say ‘AT&T’ or the name of the cellular service provider, and app store owner.

Did you notice how the phrase begged the question?

We don’t know why other phones aren’t seeing these kinds of figures, but they are not. Hence more android phones will come to try to replicate these successes. Here’s hoping the G2 exceeds expectations.

Ajit – I think Apple was the only OEM who could afford to be selective with its opertor partners, because it had a handset no one could resist. And so its strategy was to create demand through scarcity. However, I don’t think many OEMs can afford that – operator promiscuity is necessary for most OEMs, if they want to maximise their addressable market and hence sales.

Hampus – good observation. My guess is we won’t see any more platform efforts. The centers of gravity – Qualcomm, Intel, Nokia, Microsoft, Google, etc all have an OS at hand as a key building block of their vertical ecosystem. I dont expect any suprises here unless there is a heavyweight newcomer in the mobile business who shakes things up through M&A.

Enrique – I think we are on the same page. By PC developers I didn’t imply C++ or Java, just developers who are building on top of commoditised hardware and software platforms – and with very different problem sets than OEMs. The best way to express this is Android was designed for 3rd party developers, whereas it should have been designed ALSO for 2nd party developers, ie OEM commercialisation partners and of course OEMs themselves.

Allan – spot on. The G2 and the next few Android devices will be the real test. Does API compatibility ensure application portability?. Sun’s Java showed this is not the case, so doubt Google will be able to do any different.

Mem – indeed, the Google UI has lots of room for improvement. But I hear OEMs are aware of this and have already employed specialist UI technology firms for the forthcoming Android devices. Let’s wait and see.

I’m waiting to see how the Android developer community will react when the first few post-G1 devices are released. If there are any significant incompatibilities between devices it’s going to discourage the developers that thought development was going to be entirely write-once. Hopefully this won’t be the case.

-ASM

[ re: ceo -- Objective-C was never ugly! ]