The gPhone that isn't: Google keeps the Linux-based handset market open

What stood out most in Google's announcement of Android last November was not that it was a Linux-based open phone platform (there are several of those already), but that it looked, quite literally, like something more than the "iPhone killer" many expected. It was, instead closed-phone killer

Well, not really. The iPhone isn't going to die. Rather it looked like an open alternative to the iPhone that might be just what the phone makers need to get out of their death-dance with carriers and start making cellular telephony (and mobile everything) Net-native.

Apple, for all its inventiveness (which is enormous -- credit where due), did a deal with the devil when it launched iPhone in partnership with AT&T. In so doing, Apple became a captive manufacturer for one carrier and crippled the iPhone's Net nativity. Google, on the other hand, put its enormous market heft behind all phone makers with the guts to risk breaking ranks with their carrier partners and to start making truly open mobile handsets (a carefully chosen word that means "more than phones").

The platform is called Android, and the SDK invites development of all kinds of devices, with phones playing the center circle of the market's bulls-eye.

But the target is much bigger. To explore those dimensions, Google is offering $10 million in awards for developers building mobile apps for the platform.

Challenge I runs from January 2 through March 3 of this year (right now, if you're reading this fresh off the newsstand or out of the mailbox). Fifty winners will receive $25,000 toward additional development and will be eligible for ten awards of $275,000 each, plus ten others at $100,000 each. Those are due May 1, and will be announced at the end of that month. The $5 million Challenge II will reward development on Android-based handsets that will start shipping later in the year. Details for that are not yet revealed at press time.

Winners will "leverage all that the Andoid platform has to offer in order to provide consumers with their most compelling experiences." If you win (or even if you don't), the intellectual property you create (even if you don't wish to call it that) will be yours to keep.

What's especially cool about the "gPhone" is that it isn't for, or by, Google. That was the defaulted expectation of many, based on expectations set by Apple with the iPhone. Instead the field remains, as it already was: wide open.

Sources...

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071105_mobile_open.html

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071112_android_challenge.html

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