Android to aim at businesses

Google Inc plans to include support for business users in its Android operating system as soon as this year, pitting it against BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, a senior executive said.

Andy Rubin, Google's top Android executive, said on Friday that as well as expanding consumer features like social networking and gaming, future Android versions would support businesses who give phones to employees working on the road.

"Today, we don't support many enterprise applications but in the future, I think enterprise will be a good focus for us," Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google, told Reuters. He added that he expected to this to happen this year.

By year-end, phone makers will have launched 15 to 20 Android phone models, Rubin said. But he declined to say when manufacturers would release models with the new business software.

Any technology company could have a tough job entering the mobile enterprise market as Rim's BlackBerry is the favorite for many information technology managers, who have to support applications such as mobile email.

But Rubin said Google can compete by incorporating Android with existing Google apps like email, documents and calendars.

For example, corporations could cut costs on hardware for data storage if they give workers Android phones that support business applications connected to Google's data centers.

"You can, from an enterprise perspective, dramatically control your costs," Rubin said. "You don't have to build out infrastructure any more. Google's already doing it,"

Part of the strategy would be giving IT managers control over the phones their employees use.

"It's how do you put the control in the hands of the IT manager and give him the tools to deploy all his enterprise applications on the phone, and how does he manage the phone for security?" Rubin said.



CONSUMER FEATURES

Earlier this month Google announced the development of its Chrome operating system, which overlaps with Android in netbook computers, raising questions about the future of Android. But Rubin is already developing three new versions of Android.

Google will release two versions of Android this year: Android 1.6 code-named Donut and Android 2.0 code-named Eclair. The third version is code-named Flan.

Rubin said there will be a fourth version.

He declined to discuss specific functions in Donut or Eclair except to say that they would take advantage of the most powerful processors on the market for features like 3D gaming.

Citing the Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm Inc as an example, Rubin said it would give Android phones the same processing speed as the desktop computers of four years ago.

"They're really closing the gap and you're really starting to carry around a small computer in your pocket," he said. "You can start really thinking about serious gaming like you would on a Nintendo DS or a PSP handheld."

Rubin also said social networking services would be a key consumer focus for Android. Most advanced phones already support for social networks like Facebook and microblogging service Twitter, but Rubin said he is aiming for integrating social services deep into the operating system.

Some of the innovations rival Palm Inc's high-profile Pre phone includes the way it keeps texts and instant messages with a given contact in one place as well as its integration of Facebook contacts in the address book.

Rubin described this as "a step in the right direction." In comparison, Android options will include having Facebook contacts' photos and status updates appear on your phone when they call, potentially changing how a conversation starts.

Phone communications should pivot around the people you know, Rubin said, instead of separate folders and files with different things such as addresses and photos of those people.

"I want it just to be part of the system. I want it to be a stream of data that any (app) can tap into if it makes sense," he said. "I want to make that data available to anything, including third party developers."

This would only happen with the user's consent, Google spokeswoman Katie Watson, said, adding that Rubin was referring to future developments.

"This is stuff that's never been done before," he said.

Chrome, Android Have Different Jobs, Google Says

Google's emerging Chrome operating system won't squeeze out Android, according to Andy Rubin, the company's vice president of mobile engineering platforms.

chrome osMobile device OSes have specialized jobs that other platforms don't, such as running network protocol stacks, carefully managing battery life and handling handoffs among cell towers, Rubin said.

"There's different problems to be solved in different categories of consumer products," Rubin said. "But that doesn't mean that ... one wins and one doesn't win. You need different technologies for different solutions."

Speaking at an event in San Francisco where Google and T-Mobile USA showed off the new MyTouch Android-based handset, Rubin said Google would use the Android Marketplace as a "carrot" to prevent fragmentation of the OS. He also said Google Checkout is just the first of what should be a wide range of payment platforms for the Marketplace.

androidT-Mobile introduced the MyTouch, a touch-screen device from HTC priced at US$199 with a two-year contract, on Wednesday. It's the second Android-based phone from the carrier. Though other mobile operators have expressed interest in selling their own Android products, T-Mobile aims to keep its dominance, according to Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's chief technology officer and senior vice president for technology.

"We want to go deeper with Android, faster than anybody else will, and further than anybody else will. We'll push it to uncomfortable limits that other carriers won't follow," Brodman said. T-Mobile makes a subscriber's personal and contact information portable across Android phone models and will offer applications for use on all of them, he said.

Two Android application developers who appeared at the event said they chose the platform for its openness. Geodelic Systems' Sherpa is a location-based application that provides information about a user's surroundings and fine-tunes its tips by learning the user's preferences over time. Android lets it interact with other applications on the phone, such as an ordering application used by a coffee shop, Geodelic founder Rahul Sonnad said.

Voice Text, which IT professional Alex Byrnes developed on his spare time, can convert spoken words into text messages or other written entries for various Android applications. Using the open platform, Byrnes is happy not to be tied to the fate of a particular company.

"If Google and T-Mobile shut down tomorrow, Android would go on," Byrnes said.

Sherpa is free, and Voice Text costs $1.25. One limitation of Android is that applications such as Voice Text can only be purchased with Google Checkout. Byrnes said he hasn't heard any complaints from people who wanted to use a different payment method.

Google Checkout became the payment system because it was easy for the development team to add on, Google's Rubin said. Google now plans to provide APIs (application programming interfaces) for attaching different payment platforms that are appropriate to carriers in various parts of the world, he said.

"The idea is ... not to be locked to (Google) Checkout, not to be locked to a credit card, but to basically support everything out there as a payment system," Rubin said.

Google aims to prevent fragmentation of the Android platform by controlling access to the Android Marketplace, which is where the value lies for developers, Google's Rubin said. To get into the Android Market, applications have to pass "very basic compatibility tests," available to everyone, that ensure compatibility with Android APIs, he said.

Google continues to plan for new releases of Android about twice a year, roughly for summer and the year-end holiday season, Rubin said. Sticking with the food-oriented naming convention under which it is currently offering the Cupcake version, Google will call its next release Donut and follow that with Eclair and Flan. Social networking will be a major focus of one upcoming release, which will add social elements into "every experience on the phone," he said.

Rubin downplayed the success of Apple's iPhone and App Store, which has continued to overshadow Google's platform in device and application sales since the October 2008 launch of the first Android phone, T-Mobile's G1.

"I don't feel the need to catch up," Rubin said in answer to a question about Android's position among developers. And in the long run, Android will win out with diversity, he said. Recently, a device manufacturer he had never heard of walked into Rubin's office with 18 new devices built for Android, Rubin said.

"History's shown that a single product that's a global product has limitations on how much it can scale," Rubin said.

Google's Rubin: Android 'a revolution'

Among all the companies fighting to grab a piece of the brightest star in computing--the smartphone--Google seems the least interested in taking the spoils.

Android, Google's mobile operating system, doesn't generate revenue for the company, and likely never will--at least in the direct sense. But Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms, thinks Google and the world will benefit from any device created with the intent of getting more people onto the Internet, and isn't shy about explaining why the open-source approach chosen for Android holds the most promise of reaching that goal.

Android made its debut in 2007, a few months after another computer with designs on improving the Internet experience on a phone--the iPhone--hit the streets as perhaps the most hyped gadget ever. Buzz has been slower to build around Android, but that could start to change as additional phones arrive that have a bit more pizazz than the G1, the world's first Android phone released last October.

Ahead of next week's Google I/O Developer Conference, where Rubin is expected to discuss future Android phones and goals for the software, he sat down with CNET News to review Google's progress thus far and share his impressions of what makes Android unique.

Q: How do you reconcile the goals of staying open with the need to offer carriers their own experience and the compatibility problems that may come as a part of that?
Rubin: Traditionally what's happened is the burden has been on the (phone makers) to be systems integrators. And what you get is kind of a lowest common denominator of functionality and usability because the software was actually developed by multiple parties, and nobody was really thinking holistically about the user experience.

It's (about) how do people expect these products to perform, and what are the various paces that a consumer will put these products through? No one company was thinking about that.

And so a huge benefit to this open platform is that it's complete, it's basically everything you need to build a phone. Sometimes the reason things fragment is because the platform is incomplete and people need to fill in the pieces. And when you fill in the pieces, you inherently have incompatibility.

It is possible to have a completely different user interface with a completely different look and feel but still be compatible. And that will be demonstrated.

There will be a couple of launches; we've generated a lot of interest in China. The use cases in China are slightly different in the U.S.; typically in China, because of the Asian input, people prefer a pen-based interface rather than a capacitive-touch based interface because they expect a stylus to be able to draw the complex characters. So the use case has completely changed but we have achieved compatibility.

How did the goal of Android evolve after it was brought into Google?
Rubin: The goal was pretty much the same, the business model obviously changed. Google's business model is deep into advertising, and so for Google this is purely a scale of the business, we just want to reach more people, and hopefully they'll use Google and we'll get the upside of the advertising revenue.

By the way, we're confident enough in our advertising business and our ability to help people find information that we don't somehow demand they use Google. If somebody wants to use Android to build a Yahoo phone, great.

Did you ever consider doing a phone? A Google phone?
Rubin: Yeah...I mean, it's funny, if you build one phone...I'd much rather be the guy that does a platform that's capable of running on multiple companies' phones than just focusing on a single product.

A single product is going to have, eventually, limitations. Even if that was two products that's going to have limitations. But if it's a hundred products, now we're getting somewhere, to the scale at which Google thinks people want to access information.

Getting back to business models, Google has a great business model around advertising, and there's a natural connection between open source and the advertising business model. Open source is basically a distribution strategy, it's completely eliminating the barrier to entry for adoption.

When Android was a start-up company, it was always a razor/razor blade business. The razor, the free thing, was the open-source operating system. In Android's original business model, the blades were basically provisioning systems that we sold to wireless carriers that had hooks into the open-source operating system. That was an unproven business model, I would say, and certainly the feedback I got when we were going for venture financing was that it was an unproven business model.

I was willing to give it a go, but then Larry and Sergey and Eric came along and said, "it's much more aligned with Google's core business and Google's business model, and you'll have a much easier time executing within Google." And retroactively, I agree.

Is this a market share play? Is this something where you want to conquer the mobile world?
Rubin: We look at it first from the scale perspective. The mission here is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and relevant. So the accessible part: think of a world in which you are somehow prevented from accessing the information you want. When I go to a hotel room and pay the $19.95 to get on the Internet and they have some firewall that doesn't let me get to my Exchange server, it makes me berserk.

I look at things--and Google looks at things--in (terms of) how could the landscape change in such a way that consumers who want to access Google services can't?

In that honest goal of not having consumers being blocked and allowing them to access information, it helps our competitors as well. What we don't want to do is disadvantage anybody by being the only person; we don't want to create any kind of separate structure where people can only access Google. And this is the definition of openness: it's not just open source, it's the freedom to get the information that you're actually looking for.

Why is this approach better what Apple or Palm is doing where they control the whole device?
Rubin: Controlling the whole device is great, (but) we're talking about 4 billion handsets. When you control the whole device the ability to innovate rapidly is pretty limited when it's coming from a single vendor.

You can have spurts of innovation. You can nail the enterprise, nail certain interface techniques, or you can nail the Web-in-the-handset business, but you can't do everything. You're always going to be in some niche.

What we're talking about is getting out of a niche and giving people access to the Internet in the way they expect the Internet to be accessed. I don't want to create some derivative of the Internet, I don't want to just take a slice of the Internet, I don't want to be in the corner somewhere with some dumbed-down version of the Internet, I want to be on the Internet.

Even if that comes at the cost of compatibility or UI advances? If you're going to be the Everyman phone, you're going to have to make some sacrifices at some point, right?
Rubin: I think that's yet to be seen. I think we've done a pretty good job. Again, we're talking about a clean slate technology that didn't exist a few years ago. So I'm actually thinking this could be a revolution.

Remember people used to trumpet "write once, run everywhere"? Well, I think we're actually there. I think when we start talking about the possibility of exploring things like Netbooks and car navigation systems, you have potentially different processor architecture types. You have Intel, you have ARM, set-top boxes have MIPS.

We have all sorts of different processor architectures, and the guys who are steeped in legacy have trouble addressing those markets with a single solution. I actually think Android is the potential single solution that can address all those markets, and it's new, it's revolutionary. It will change the game.

If this is a revolution, why haven't we seen more of these phones?
Rubin: It takes about 18 months to build a phone from end to end. What we wanted to do for our market entry was make sure that we had one successful showcase product to prove that the product was reliable and robust and ready to go. We chose HTC as our partner for that.

The forthcoming Samsung i7500, based on Google's Android
(Credit: Samsung)

At the moment we open-sourced, November 7 (2007), that's when a lot of these guys got their hands on it. We're still in that 18-month window of building products, and what you'll see coming up is a whole string of products.

What did you learn from Android 1.0 to 1.5?
Rubin: I learned that 1.5 was the product I wished was 1.0. The reason is it's a different business for Google: helping the industry build operating systems for their cell phones.

Because on the Web, you can iterate very quickly, and you can put things out in beta, you can fix bugs literally hourly. On cell phones you're blasting something in a ROM in a device that's in manufacturing where you did just-in-time ordering of all the parts and have inventory risk and everything else. Widgets are literally coming down a factory line, and if software isn't ready by the time they reach the end of the line they're going to drop on the floor and pile up. And that winds up costing a lot of people a lot of money. And if you don't get it right, you're kind of hosed.

What is going to dictate who wins and loses in this market? We all have different things that we may want in a phone. How do you try to be the Everyman phone and try to keep up with what's going on?
Rubin: We're trying to be something really unique, and I don't think anybody else is offering this. We put a very focused spotlight on openness, and openness is the means by which you get the product that you want.

Do people care (about openness)? I mean, the industry might care, the partners in the Open Handset Alliance may care, but do consumers?

It's an enabler. I'm not on some marketing campaign to educate consumers about what openness means. Actually, if you ask anybody on the street, you're going to get 10 different definitions of openness. The Symbian guys are going to be like "I'm open," and the LiMo guys are going to say "I'm open."

There's probably like a royal flush of openness, where you can lay your cards on the table and say (pointing) "open, open, open, open, open," it's the guy with the most open that's going to win.

I think we're that. I think that we have an open ecosystem, we have an open-source platform, we chose the right license, there are no viral aspects, it's absolutely 100 percent free, it's complete, it's everything you need to build a phone. When you add all that stuff up, all those ingredients, potentially--I think the jury's still out--we can make a really successful product.