Om Malik interviewed Lee Williams, executive director at Symbian. He talked about SEE09, their developer conference in London next week and shared his unfiltered views of Google’s Android.
He stated the obvious, but often overlooked truth, that Google’s revenues comes from targeted advertising and Android is being used to track user behavior (via cookies) — just like they do with search/gmail.
“Android is building a perfect storm of fragmentation,” he said. “I don’t view Apple as evil, just greedy.”
The Android barage is near. Verizon is set to launch the Research in Motion’s Storm 2 on Wednesday, three Android devices and 12 other handsets by the end of the year.
- Verizon is set to launch the Research in Motion’s Storm 2 on Wednesday, but will offer three Android devices including the Motorola Sholes (with keyboard), HTC Desire (without keyboard) and the HTC Dragon (with a large screen and GHz processor). They’re expected to rollout 12 other handsets by the end of the year.
- Sprint soon will offer both the HTC Hero and Samsung Moment, both Android phones. Sprint will release the second Palm webOS device, the Palm Pixi, on Nov. 15, priced at $100, after $150 in rebates.
- T-Mobile will offer at least four Android phones; the G-1, myTouch 3G, Samsung Behold II and Motorola CLIQ.
At the moment, Android accounts for 3 percent of the smartphone market, but more than 75 million Android handsets will ship in 2012, according to Gartner Research, making Google’s mobile operating system the second most popular smartphone OS behind Symbian.
