Android spotted in Barcelona; Sarin calls for OS clarity
13 February 2008
Android spotted in Barcelona; Sarin calls for OS clarity
During his keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Vodafone frontman Arun Sarin, called for more consolidation of mobile handset operating systems.
Sarin said that just a handful of device OSes need to emerge from the 30 to 40 presently available, although other commentators would say that there are between 300 and 400 different platforms out there.
In 2006 Vodafone attempted to standardise its own handset portfolio across three mobile operating system platforms: Microsoft Windows Mobile, Symbian/S60 and Linux. But at the time it was noted that the Big V had not factored in Research In Motion's BlackBerry platform and the many different flavours that Linux itself is split into.
The Google-backed Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is just one of the forums seeking to consolidate mobile Linux and telecoms.com got a sneak peak at the Android platform running on demonstration hardware on the ARM stand. David Rose, director of OEM sales at ARM demonstrated the platform running on the already aging ARM9 processor. The interface was clean and surprisingly smooth flowing given the polished appearance of the UI, showing what could be achieved on lower end or older devices.
However, there wasn't much to see beyond what Google has already demonstrated in its own promo videos of the platform, so the demonstration was hardly conclusive.
The almost hardware agnostic deployment capability of Android is critical to the OHA's claims that Android is a platform that can be rolled out across any device range.
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