Android grows
The New York Times had a good day's rumour-mongering yesterday. First it broke the news that the rumoured IBM acquisition might be off, then it suggested that T-Mobile plans to make a number of different devices based on the Android operating system next year.
This latter rumour, as yet unconfirmed by T-Mobile itself, is claiming "confidential documents obtained from one of the company's partners," as its source.
The documents revealed plans to sell a home phone and what is being described as a tablet PC, but appears to be more of a UMPC-like touch screen mobile internet device, early next year. They will both run Google's open source Android operating system. T-Mobile was the first phone operator to offer a handset based on Android.
It looks like Android is gathering momentum. Vodafone jumped on the bandwagon in February and the NYT story observes that Samsung and Motorola, among others, plan to launch Android handsets later this year.
The move into larger mobile internet devices is the most intriguing, however, as it increases the direct competition Google's OS presents to Microsoft's Windows. Right now Windows Mobile is only used on a small proportion of handsets, but it's still expected to dominate sub-notebook form factors. If Android really starts to take off in larger form factors, losing out to Google in the internet search market will look like the least of Microsoft's problems.
