Google is finding that launching an entirely new cell phone platform is taking longer than expected. When it first announced its Android mobile operating system, Google said the first Android phones would be available during the second half of this year. Now the mobile carriers that signed up as Android partners are pushing out their launches, with only T-Mobile still trying to get an Android phone out by the fourth quarter of this year. All the other carriers are pushing out their deployments until 2009. Reports the WSJ:
T-Mobile USA expects to deliver an Android-powered phone in the fourth period. But that launch is taking up so much of Google’s attention and resources that Sprint Nextel Corp., which had hoped to launch an Android phone this year, won’t be able to, a person familiar with the matter said.
China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world with nearly 400 million subscriber accounts, had planned to launch an Android phone in the third quarter but it has run into issues that will likely delay the launch until late this year or early 2009, a person familiar with the matter says.
. . . AT&T Inc., the U.S. carrier for the iPhone, is still working with Google to determine if it is feasible to launch an Android phone.
Sprint wants to add its own bells and whistles to its Android service, and the recent management shakeup is not helping matters. China Mobile is having trouble getting Android to work with Chinese characters and integrating it into its existing data services.
By the time Android phones seriously hit the market next year, there will be more than 10 million iPhones and many more Blackberries and other smart phones to contend with. Android holds a lot of promise and is generating a lot of excitement among developers, who are already creating interesting mobile apps for the platform. But without phones in consumer’s hands, it won’t matter how cool Android is.
Getting Android right is immensely important to Google, which faces a huge platform shift as the mobile Web finally starts to take off. It needs to parlay its leading position on the Web today into a leading position on the mobile Web. And it cannot do that alone. The more players involved (carriers, developers, handset manufacturers), the greater the chance for delays or other hiccups. Contrast that with Apple’s approach to the iPhone, where it controls every aspect it can. Which platform will win in the end?
They’ll fix it eventually
Interesting that Symbian operating systems aren’t even in your mini-poll, when they’re amongst the top guys, in Europe in particular. I’m not a big fan of S60, on which devices like the N95 run, but I can’t deny that it’s doing well, it’s flexible and (reasonably) reliable.
Five years in the mobile world isn’t that long… In particular in countries like Canada where customers can be tied in to a contract for as long as three years. (Erk! I struggle with 18 months on the same device)
I’m so happy I didn’t buy an iPhone and got a AT&T go phone instead with the $29 a month plan.
Now I can ditch AT&T at any time and go with T-Mobile to get Android.
If you can’t deliver Android by Q4, it’s bye, bye AT&T
I am sick of using the software emulator to develop.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8.....9/sizes/o/
I gave up an entire year of having a decent cell phone just waiting for the day Android would be released and I could run my apps.
It’s truly amazing how ahead of the game apple was on this area.
They pulled off an operating system, a device, and a breakthrough in user experience… a year ago.
anyone waiting for android is a sucker. It has the potential to be great, but I see absolutely no reason to wait around for it.
@4, the data plans are bad though. It was $100 min a month and often times more for iPhone 1.0
the great thing about android is that there will be competition.
I don’t want to pay $100+ a month for a cell phone. Neither do a lot of people. Actually neither do most people. Steve jobs didn’t want to pay for phoning people either which is why he was selling blue boxes to steal from the phone companies.
Android is open source. One fine day a VoIP app is going to come out for it. A VoIP app that cheats the minutes you buy with the plan. A VoIP app that lets you call Japan and leave the phone off the hook 24/7 and not worry about your bill
That’s why I’m waiting for Android. That and the Eclipse stuff.
Data on cell phones with unlimited plans isn’t metered. VoIP is data.
“with only T-Mobile still trying to get an Android phone out by the fourth quarter of this year. All the other carriers are pushing out their deployments until 2009.”
Now that’s really strike me. Isn’t 2009 the same year that Sun says JavaFX Mobile will be available too ? Sun has indicated it is working with phone companies to deliver a JavaFX version and given that Sun indeed has a strong track record of delivering Java technology into mobile phone in the form of J2ME, will that be one of the cause for delay and waitAndSee attitude of the carriers ? Couldn’t rule that out too.
2009 seems a strong year where Flash Lite, Android, JavaFX etc compete in a big way.
I am sure android will give some good competition to apple because it comes from Google stable. But iPhone is already a winner in US and around the world.
Surprised how many people are banking on the iPhone being the big one. iPhone is great, and I wish I had it but you guys honestly think a company like RIM, who’s dominated the market and knows what they are doing won’t come out with something new and innovative that’ll push their market share further?
RIM basically set a nice standard for smart phones. Apple came in and pushed their limits, now RIM will “retaliate” with something else.
I think this “delay” is being seriously exaggerated by most of the people reporting on the WSJ story. Thankfully, the TechCrunch piece seems more balanced and fair than most.
Here is my take:
http://phandroid.com/2008/06/2.....o-you-ask/
Talking about US bias… where is Symbian on this list? Isn’t 40% marketshare enough?
Asking which platform will be dominant for _web_ applications needs different options. Both the iPhone and Android use the WebKit platform, so any iPhone designed web applications run great on an Android device.
Either your poll should have excluded the word ‘web’ in the question, or you should have been using different choices.
It’s worth mentioning that Android will be using Safari’s WebKit (which is Open Source) for its internal web browser. So, even if Android is wildly popular, it will share the same browser rendering engine as the iPhone.
http://gigaom.com/2007/11/13/webkit/
With Nokia, Android and the iPhone all using WebKit, the browser’s marketshare on mobile platforms will be skyrocketing.
@14. N95 also implements WebKit!
Not good news. Carriers look for ways to differentiate. I’ll be interested to see how standardized Android ends up being are across different carriers. We don’t need another J2ME mess.
http://groups.google.com/group.....9948985a1/
My own app has nothing to do with VoIP, but I am a bit of a Linux hacker, so if nobody else tries, I will surely try. Since it’s FOSS there will be no protections. The only protections could come at the provider where they could block traditional VoIP ports. Then you can burrow through that with tunneling.
3g would be ideal, but I’m pretty sure you could do it with t-mobile’s network too if you compressed the voice stream enough.
We literally have the potential never to deal with “minute plans” or “long distance” fees again.
That is why Google’s is going to be so much better than Apple’s. If something like that takes off, Google is simply going to go “ooops”. It’s open source.
It’ll be interesting to see if the carriers go for one right away, go for all of them or wait and see which one prevails - which could lead them to come in too late.
With the iPhone’s strong push in the mobile market and with others - not as popular, using pico projectors - we, as users can only gain from the wide array of choices. That’s a link to an article about all the different choices that are coming up.
Who cares about the carriers? Just get the device makers on-board with a Android-based GSM phone, and I’ll slip my SIM in it. Phone subsidies are for those that don’t understand TCO.
iPhone all the way. I’m not infected by fanboyism, by the way.
In a couple of sentences, the author here hit the point on the head: Who cares what developers think is cool? Ever since the Apple announced the iPhone SDK and the distribution scheme, all I ever see are complaints from developers about having to use Objective-C and of having to sell only through Apple. What I don’t ever see from these developers is “Wow, a viable mobile platform I can develop for that is actually accepted by the public!”
Android is so much like the iPhone, I ask myself, what’s the point? Oh it’s open source. Yeah, go ask the general public, if they ever heard of OpenOffice. Ask them if they ever used Linux. Sure, FireFox is popular with the public. But is it because it’s open-source or because it’s so much better than IE. My guess it’s the latter. The general public DOES NOT CARE whether something is open-source or not.
Oh, and as a bonus, developing an app for the iPhone pretty much means you also developed an app for the Mac or vice versa. When you develop for the Android what else can that app run on? Great one more different platform to program for.
I wish they could get it out this year. I hope they do as I was wanting to see the new google phone and software and how it compares to my windows mobile phone in functionality.
“@4, the data plans are bad though. It was $100 min a month and often times more for iPhone 1.0″
A data plan for the iPhone is $20 a month for unlimited data. One of the cheapest available. The cheapest iPhone plans with voice and data were around $60 a month. Where did you get $100 min from? The data plan for a blackberry and many other smart phones is $35. With the iPhone 3G it will be $30 a month for unlimited data. The iPhone sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Maybe Google is having a hard time convincing carriers and manufacturers to release Android as ‘Beta’ for the first couple of years.
Maybe Google should acquire one of these guys and force the issue.
Ha ha ha ha…now I know the real IQ and intelligence levels of TechCrunch readers…..pretty low!
iPhone having 44% of mobile platform share, Android 29% and Windows Mobile only 8%! - what are you dudes smoking!
Thank god you don’t advise people where to put their money or are being paid to make predictions about technology.
Let’s set this poll result in concrete on the home page of TechCruch so I can laugh at the ridiculousness of it and it’s respondents in 5 years time!
This Android delay is music to Apple’s ears. Whilst Google spends the next six or more months trying to develop their Android Mobile, Apple can spend the same time perfecting their next iPhone Model. So that once Android is at last ready to launch, Apple can rain on their parade almost instantly.
Whilst Google likes to praise the Android Mobile, as the first open source Mobile Network, it is at the end of the day an attempt by Google to create a ‘Walled Garden’ of Google Services for a Mobile Web O/S.
Apple gives Google fantastic presence on the iPhone, through Google Maps, YouTube and of course Google Search. But somehow I don’t think Google will return the compliment on their own Android Platform.
google should consider buying more iPhone app startups and surviving as a barnicle on the iPhone whale!
And Google is putting an apps market like Apple with the iPhone. You can see presentations >Google Android Developer Challenge - Top 46 apps
I’d like also to hear what you think about this article Google Union or the virtual communism of the digital age?
Wake up.. T-mobile, ATT, Sprint, China mobile are all network operators. I’m not sure if this is news for anyone but it’s not the network operator that develops the phones that will run Android as their OS..
So it doesn’t matter what any of these operators say. The deciding factor is if there are any phone manufacturer that will be able to deliver a stable, secure Android powered phone this year to these operators.
Looking at the announced delays from the operators they are not able to get these devices and it will be the same case for T-mobile, maybe they just haven’t received the bad news yet from their phone supplier.
Enough with the Google love already. OpenMoko is a serious contender as well. It’s both hardware and software.
Ashtrash, you don’t understand the US carrier market. The carriers do yield a lot of power, and dictate what goes on the phones.