open handset alliance

Google's sure got their fingers in a lot of pies these days. I'm sure you've probably already heard about Android (or at least the rumours of a gPhone) but if you haven't, I'll take a moment to share my thoughts.  

A quick runthrough - for months now, there has been gossip that Google was planning to enter the cellphone/mobile data industry.  Bloggers quickly dubbed the ethereal mystery device gPhone, but that's all there were--rumours.  On Guy Fawkes Day of this year, the Android Platform was announced.  

Basically, google's not making a phone of their own, they're coordinating/leading the new Open Handset Alliance to develop what they call the Android Platform.  Android is an open standard (s'posed to be licenced under Apache v2 if I'm not mistaken, though the members of the Open Handset Alliance apparently signed a Non-fragmentation agreement to keep code from forking in non-interoperable ways) for a mobile telecommunications platform.  

Android uses a Linux kernel, a specialized Java virtual machine, and provides a library (with things like a/v codecs, etc.)--they've already released the first version of the SDK, so if you're a code monkey and you've got time to kill, please hit up http://code.google.com/android and then share your thoughts with us.  The libraries support 3d hardware acceleration if you've got the hardware, and each piece of code is designed to be modular and interoperable.  This means that anything within the software stack will be replaceable.  Good times.  

On the whole, this seems like exactly the kind of thing that mobile computing/communications needs.  Open, modular, ubiquitous.  In other words, it sounds good.  

It just kind of makes me nervous that a consortium of corporate superpowers is in charge of this.  There's definite promise here, but keep your eyes open.  It almost sounds too good to be true.  

Some further reading.....

http://code.google.com/android 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28mobile_phone_platform%29

http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/android_overview.html 

http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/13/1348233&from=rss