When Google and its partners first unveiled plans for the Android operating system, they billed it as software that would run mobile phones. That mission was accomplished the following year with the late 2008 release of T-Mobile’s G1 phone. More Android-enabled handsets are on the way.
But before long, you may be seeing Android in a lot of other electronic devices.
Just ask Mark Hamblin, who helped design the original touch screen for the Apple iPhone. Now the CEO of Touch Revolution, Hamblin is tinkering with Android so it can work in a slew of gadgets other than wireless phones. In late 2009, Touch Revolution plans to introduce a remote control and a touch-screen land-line home phone that will be powered by Android. Also in the works from Hamblin’s company: touch-screen menus for restaurants, Android-based medical devices, and a 15-in. kitchen computer where family members can leave messages for one another.
More Devices on the Way
Android everywhere would come as good news to Google and chipmakers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments that have invested in its development and would welcome the chance to sell semiconductors in new markets. But Android ubiquity could cause headaches for Microsoft, which would rather see its own software on a wider range of electronic devices.
Where will Android end up next? A handful of electronics manufacturers plan to unveil Android-based mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, and stripped-down computers known as netbooks at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, scheduled for later this month in Barcelona. “Nine months ago it was a lot of people who were curious” about using Android, says John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer at WindRiver Systems, a consulting firm that’s working with several Asia-based manufacturers on the products. “Now they are starting to build designs” that effectively bypass Windows altogether, he says. Bruggeman declines to name…