Google Android - The Android Log

Yet again, Google, which is fighting the platform wars on multiple fronts, could be Apple’s stiffest competition. It is leading another coalition to build an open-operating system called Android that will work in the next generation of cell phones as well as other consumer devices. The Open Handset Alliance has 34 members — mobile-phone carriers as well as handset makers, including Motorola, LG Electronics, Samsung, China Mobile, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. Though Google ceo Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s board of directors and Jobs saluted Google as a partner whose apps were on the iPhone, Apple is notably not in the alliance.

This appears to be a case of — in Valleyspeak — “frenemies,” companies that work together in some businesses while competing in others.

The first Android-powered phones will arrive, Google says, in the second half of the year, possibly around the same time as the new iPhone. At a recent Google developers’ conference, the company showed off, for the first time, a generic cell phone running the operating system. Touch sensitive, with an onboard, motion-sensing accelerometer that can also place a user precisely on a Google satellite map, the device resembles nothing so much as an iPhone. Android, explains Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, is an open platform for developers: Facebook; the code is theirs to modify. He says developers have so far written more than 1,800 applications, which could be distributed on a Google site arranged according to popularity, as YouTube is. “There’s some pretty innovative stuff there,” Rubin explains. “This is merging the handset and the Web and coming up with something completely new.”

Google (NasdaqGS:GOOG - News) is putting its might behind its Linux-based Android cellular platform, and some 30 big companies are backing the search king.

The move to Linux is a potential game changer because it could loosen the control that cellular carriers have over the applications they support. Also, it would give handset makers and third-party application developers greater control over market direction and trends. And Nokia`s (NYSE:NOK - News) Symbian and Microsoft (NasdaqGS:MSFT - News) could lose licensing revenue.

But there`s a long way to go for any of that to happen.