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Verizon and Google form axis against AT&T/Apple - but how open is it?
Published: 7 October, 2009
Tags >> US | Verizon Wireless | Google | Application Environment | CDMA | Android | Apple | AT&T
Support for Google Voice, side-swipes at Apple - the Verizon-Google presentation today was all about taking on AT&T, setting the new partners up as champions of openness against the closed iPhone world. Verizon Wireless and Google will co-develop a range of Android devices, the companies' CEOs said at a press conference today, ahead of the CTIA Wireless show. Details were scarce, but this bare bones statement has various implications.
One, Android will not just find its way into branded smartphones, such as the anticipated Motorola Tao/Sholes, at Verizon, but also into the devices that the operator brands and helps to design- typically in the midrange, and increasingly the basis of the cellcos' own web services platforms and stores. This will accomplish an important goal for Android, to get into all levels of handset and web usage, and ironically, the US CDMA carriers - traditionally those with the most closed and controlled networks - are offering it the most open door (Google already has a close development partnership with Sprint Nextel). Symbian is also chasing the mass market and strategic carrier partnerships, and in the US has hopes of AT&T; originally, Windows Mobile was the first of the full operating systems to seek market share through the carrier branded approach, but may find its importance to US cellcos like Verizon reduced by the new Android initiatives.
Second - and another irony - Google knows, for all its protestations about the mobile web just operating through generic browsers and invisible carriers like the PC internet, that Android is dependent on the operators to make an impact on the cellular world, at least in the short to medium term. So it is working hard to give Verizon a more open platform than its usual centrepieces - BlackBerry and WinMo - to support its next generation open developer initiative, and at the same time to steal thunder from the iPhone. And in return it gets versions of its key applications, like Voice and Maps, optimized for the carrier networks and preloaded on their devices. The co-developed gadgets, which presumably will come from a range of hardware vendors and carry dual Verizon-Google branding, will come "pre-loaded with innovative applications from both parties as well as third party developers", said the firms. Does this really sound a world away from the AT&T iPhone?
Verizon and Google certainly want to make it sound that way. The pointed mentions of Google Voice - still the focus of disputes with Apple and AT&T, and of FCC probes - were designed to emphasize the contrast with the iPhone model starkly. Voice would be one of the Google products tightly integrated into Verizon's Android platform, said CEO Lowell McAdam - saying, in a clear swipe at AT&T, "the device is either open or it's not".
In fact, there is a huge grey area between "open" and "not" on phones. Preloaded and optimized apps, chosen by the carrier, may deliver a simple and efficient experience to users, and avoid destruction of the carrier's network through uncontrolled usage, but they are hardly the stuff of the open web dream or of unfettered consumer choice. And it remains to be seen how carrier specific Verizon's Android-based platform turns out to be, and at which points it manages to lock users in.
