Who Better Than Dell to Ruin Our Customer Satisfaction Rating?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on January 30, 2008 at 2:28 PM PT
Q: So if this is not the Gphone, when will we see the Gphone, and what will it be?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: We’re not announcing anything, but this is the platform for building a Gphone. It starts a whole wave of innovation …
Q: Does that mean there will be NO Google phone you can buy?
ES: Imagine not just one Gphone, but a thousand Gphones as a result of the partnerships … the many other people who will be joining the open initiative. We forgot to tell you that it’s available next week, and the terms are the broadest in the industry.
Q: ………..Gphone?
ES: We are not announcing a Google phone.
Q: Eric, I want to go back to the Gphone–what’s the deal?
ES: The deal is we don’t pre-announce products… if there were to be a Gphone, it would run Android.
–Excerpt from Google’s Nov. 5 Android analyst call
Google and Dell are collaborating on an Android-based cellphone?
Seems unlikely. Certainly, Google has said repeatedly that Android is intended not as a platform for building one Google-branded Gphone, but an entire ecosystem of them. And that will require the investment and commitment of a host of mobile-phone manufacturers–manufacturers who probably aren’t interested in developing handsets that run on a competitor’s platform.
A more likely scenario: Dell simply joins Google’s Open Handset Alliance and announces its own Android-based phone.
