Penrillian have a new newsletter covering Android. It concludes that Android will probably increase rather than decrease fragmentation for developers.

In order to become the de facto standard, Open Handset Alliance OEMs will have to ship a substantial number of phones. Currently, most handset sales are driven by what’s available from the network operators. If this continues then Android’s fate may end up being tied to whether network operators wish to supply these phones.

It will be interesting to see how the Open Handset Alliance partners will produce phones that network operators will want to sell. Will they produce ’sexy’ and easy to use phones as per the iPhone strategy or will they rely on new (software) features and services that currently aren’t widely available?

I suppose there’s also another possible strategy of supplying phones direct to mass market consumers. This would require a huge re-education of consumers because it’s not an established behaviour to buy a phone separate to your tariff.

Related Articles:

• Android Challenge Popular
• Android on Reference Design
• Android Business Model
• LiPS vs OHA Android
• Android First Thoughts
• Google Handset Alliance

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 11:24 am and is filed under Mobile, Android. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.