14 DAY TRIAL // Computer maker Acer is reported to be working with Google's Android operating system in an attempt to include it on a series of different devices, including a smartphone. According to the company, the mobile phone running the platform should come to the market later during the ongoing year.
“The entire industry is looking at Android,” Acer President and CEO Gianfranco Lanci stated at the company's first-quarter investor's conference in Taipei, reports PC World. At the same time, he also added, “We are testing Android on a lot of different solutions. We are working on an Android solution for the smartphone, [but] I think it's too early to say if we're going to see Android on a netbook in the near future.”
According to him, it would make more sense to see a smartphone running under Android launched on the market than a netbook featuring the OS, and, as many of you should already know, the success of Android actually relies on its presence on high-end mobile phones, and not on other types of devices, though a lot of industry players announced plans to include it on netbooks and other products.
The first Android-based mobile phone launched on the market is the HTC Dream, which came to the market as T-Mobile G1, and the company announced recently that it managed to sell more that one million units of the handset. In the meantime, a second smartphone to include the OS, the HTC Magic, went live with Vodafone, and Korean mobile phone maker Samsung also announced that it would launch its first Android phone, the I7500, in June.
The next big step for the Android is its presence in the netbook area, and Acer joins Hewlett-Packard and Asus, other computer makers that also unveiled similar plans in the area. It remains to be seen if the platform manages to become as successful in netbooks as in the smartphone market, given the fact that it will compete against Microsoft's Windows XP, the OS that is mostly common with the low-power ultra-portable mobile computers.