Google Android: Nokia and Apple Reaction

IanFogg | November 05, 2007, 05:59 PM

Google unveils Android mobile phone platform, Open Handset Alliance

My first reaction to this, is that Apple and Nokia have already reacted, pre-emptively, to Google's announcement that there will be shipping products sometime in late 2008 with the Google-inspired OS! Google's news release is only a few hours old, the products are a year off, and yet the hype is already exploding!!!

Specifically:

Nokia's Symbian Series 60 OS is already available to licensee companies, already differentiates on third party applications, plus Nokia already has a Linux platform on currently shipping shipping products (Read this report: Nokia Embraces the Whole Internet with the N810, published today).

My key finding seems especially prescient after Google's announcement of its platform play:

The N810's importance is vastly greater than the niche, savvy, youth audience, to which it will appeal or that small sales of previous tablets indicate. With the Internet tablet range, Nokia is incubating both desktop-quality technologies, and a new business model that is independent of the constraints of the traditional mobile value chain.

And Apple's iPhone runs a very capable Unix-based OS, and will be open to third party applications (read this previous post: Nokia vs Apple: History Repeats with the iPhone SDK).

Again, this part of that entry seems prescient:

I find it doubly fascinating that no one has argued that Apple should license the flavour of Mac OS used in the iPhone to third parties. How times change. Except, of course, at Microsoft and Symbian where they continue to seek out new licensees for their mobile OS's. History repeats.