How is Google planning to reshape the tablet market? Like its broader mobile play, with a liberal partnership policy, openness, and agility, according to Andy Rubin, VP of engineering at Google and
the chief architect behind Android.
Put another way, the secret to Android's
success is its "newness," Rubin told attendees of the D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Monday, according to The New York Times. "We can adapt and be more agile," Rubin said. "It's a clean slate."
During a keynote discussion, Rubin showed off a Motorola prototype running Android 3.0, nicknamed Honeycomb, a new version of the mobile operating system that is designed
specifically for tablet devices, and which is expected to debut sometime next year.
"To my eyes, it looked to be about 7 inches diagonal, maybe bigger, and it didn't have any
buttons," writes Fortune's Seth Weintraub. "It had a landscape front side camera and
a totally new OS."
Also of note, "The Motorola prototype tablet doesn't have any hardware buttons," according to
PCWorld. "Instead, it uses virtual buttons on the screen that reposition when a user rotates the tablet in any direction ... That's different from the iPad, which has a hardware home button that
is fixed."
According to Rubin, there
are now more than 172 different phones running Android available worldwide -- "an amazing number of gadgets for a platform less than 3 years old," notes eWeek's Google Watch blog.
A key reason for the rapid adoption, Rubin said of Google is that "We have the freedom to have no legacy."
"In particular," The Times notes, "he was referring to rivals
like Windows, whom he said are still heavily relying on code written years ago."
Also of note, Rubin said Monday that Android is profitable if it was broken out as a separate business. Said Rubin,
according to the Guardian, "We're making money on the advertising that's generated through Android."
Read the whole story at The Guardian (UK) et al. »