Google Android’s Dream Could Turn Into a Nightmare for Apple?

Hard to say but a lot of questions will *hopefully* be answered tomorrow at the anticipated Android press conference. The HTC Dream, brought to you by T-Mobile, will be the first handset to run Google’s new mobile operating system, Android. The device promises to give mobile-phone users a lot more freedom and flexibility.

Credit: Rizzn.com

From eWEEK:

The Dream, which is being unveiled Sept. 23 at an event in New York, is expected to hit stores Oct. 20. HTC reportedly expects 600,000 to 700,000 Dream units shipped by 2009, or some 70-plus days after the launch.

Apple’s overnight sensation iPhone shipped 1 million units in 74 days. I argued the Dream could do the same, thanks to sheer hype and word of mouth.

From InformationWeek:

It is very hard for companies to keep anything secret these days, thanks to the Internet. That said, I am surprised images of the Android handset from HTC haven’t made the rounds sooner. Some blurry shots circulated a while ago, but today we’ve got three clear shots of it.

According to Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, “One of my super secret spies at Google just happened to trade contact information with someone who admitted that the phone in his hand was the rumored Dream.”

You can view the goods here.

From Forbes:

Google has handed a few hundred phones to its internal teams of engineers for real world testing. These reference models, presumably preproduction versions of the HTC Dream, are inconspicuous. Thicker than an iPhone, the flat, grayish-black hunk of plastic does not call attention to itself. It takes a savvy pedestrian to spot its identifying marks: a bank of serial numbers engraved across its face and backplate and a discrete white “with Google” badge stamped on the back.

But they are out there.

Forbes.com spotted a phone on the streets of San Francisco. It resembles alleged HTC Dream footage leaked in a blurry video on YouTube in August. A large touch screen eats up most of the phone’s available real estate. However, unlike Apple’s device, it boasts a palette of physical buttons (both for selection and call initiation) and a small trackball for zipping across its multipaged menus. The screen slides up to reveal a shallow keyboard. Think of it as an anorexic T-Mobile Sidekick.

From CNET:

There will be plenty of hullabaloo on Tuesday when T-Mobile unveils the first phone powered by Google’s Android operating system. But the event is only the beginning of a long effort to rewrite the rules of the mobile communications industry.

The phone, a somewhat chunky model called Dream built by HTC, is expected to cost about $200 from T-Mobile and go on sale in October. Until other partners in the Google-spawned, 34-member Open Handset Alliance bring their Android products to market, this small piece of electronics will shoulder a lot of ambitions.

For T-Mobile, an Android phone could bring some Google buzz to the scrappy carrier, helping match what AT&T got from Apple’s iPhone. It also could potentially persuade customers T-Mobile’s new 3G network is worth paying give T-Mobile new revenue from online application sales.

For Google, Android is a tool to spread Internet-savvy phones far and wide. People with powerful networked phones use the Internet much more, and Google wants to be the top company supplying the information they demand online.

“Look at Japan, (where) we have far more usage of mobile Web. It’s similar with the iPhone,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin in a meeting with reporters last week. “If the Internet is widely available, that’s good for us.”

What’s not yet clear is how well Android phones will fare in the marketplace. Google’s software is untested, and there are plenty of competitors in the mobile phone market.

But Google’s advertising business is a money factory, and the company has shown it has patience to invest that money in key projects. So even if the first-generation Android phones don’t entice people to line up around the block, competitors who develop mainstream phone operating systems such as Nokia’s SymbianMicrosoft’s Windows Mobile doubtless are taking heed. and

From ZDNet:

I realize that the iPhone has been a massive hit for the company, and it promises to be a goldmine for developers, but I’m surprised that developers are willing to take the risk of developing for a closed platform like the iPhone – where their primary if not sole route to customers can be blocked arbitrarily for “competing” with a native application?

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Tags: 3G, Android, Android Leak, Android Photo, Android Picture, Android Press Conference, Apple, Blackberry, Cell Phone, Dream Phone, Google, Google Android, HTC, HTC Dream, iPhone, Mark Hopkins, Microsoft, Mobile Operating System, Mobile Phone, Nokia, OHA, Open Handset Alliance, Open Source, Press Conference, Rizzn, Rizzn.com, Sidekick, Smartphone, Symbian, T-Mobile, windows mobile, YouTube

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