29 September 2008

Motorola Building Up Android Team
Nokia Sniffing Around!?

People have been speculating for a couple of months that Finnish mobile phone giant will make mobile phones based on the Linux OS.

I didn't believe these rumors and wasn't concerned but if one of these officially-denied rumors comes true we might see the Android based Nokia phones in near future and I am just curious what does it means for Symbian?!

TechCrunch states that Nokia is "building a new Android team from scratch" which again led to speculation that Nokia could be working on the Linux based Smartphone although company denied recent speculations of abandoning the Symbian and claims they are not working on a Linux based phone and they have no plans to use Linux or Windows Mobile as a platform for their mobile phones!

The iPhone may be the only game in town for serious mobile Web developers right now, but that won’t last long. Next year, the iPhone will see some serious competition from Google's Android platform. Of course, T-Mobile will start selling the first Android phone, the G1 made by HTC, on October 22. But other cell phone manufacturers are gearing up for a major Android push.

TechCrunch reports that Motorola, one of the original partners in the Open Handset Alliance behind the open-source mobile OS, Motorola already has 50 people on its Android team and is growing that to 350, according to an Android developer approached by a headhunter to join the team. That is a huge commitment that shows how big a bet Motorola is making on Android.

TechCrunch’s source has also seen people from Nokia and Verizon at a recent Android developer conference. The conference was put on by Google last week for developers who had not yet seen the G1 to help prepare them for its launch. In general, in order to be an attendee, you had to have an Android app. Neither Nokia nor Verizon are official members of the Open Handset Alliance.

Nokia recently acquired the rest of Symbian it didn’t already own, and is determined to keep that OS as long as possible, since it powers all of its S60 phones. But Nokia may have an Android team sniffing around, which is smart even if it is for nothing other than to gain competitive intelligence. And if Android takes off, Nokia could decide to hedge its bets and launch its own Android phone.