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Sunday May 24, 2009
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Engadget Mobile today published excerpts of an unusually action-packed AT&T slide deck today, showing a dozen potential new devices for the Big Blue network.
One thing to understand as you pace through the deck is that these devices may never show up on store shelves; as Engadget Mobile editor-in-chief Chris Ziegler pointed out on Twitter, "only sure things are death and taxes." Many phones enter carrier approval processes; fewer make it out the other end.
One thing to keep an eye on is the "LE Date" field on Engadget's slides. That's the Lab Entry date - the date the device enters AT&T's labrinthine carrier approval process, a black hole from which some phones never return. Some of the devices Engadget shows - most notably the "Palm Eos," the rumored next Palm WebOS phone - haven't even entered the lab yet.
By far the most intriguing story, though, is told on the slide for the HTC Lancaster, which might be AT&T's first Android phone. I say "might," because of the note on the slide: "Initial Lab Entry dates were based on Google Mobile Services (GMS) UI. AT&T Standard UI has been requested, which puts schedule in question."
This dovetails with what AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega said about Android in April - that he wants to customize Android devices so they no longer look like Google phones.
"We in fact will be able to take the Android open-source code and put our own apps and features on an Android device," he said. "They're going to open it up and allow us to be able to customize what an Android device looks like to our customers."
When I've talked to carriers and manufacturers, they've been excited about Android as a replacement for higher end feature phones, not necessarily as another smart phone player. We're talking about devices like the Samsung Impression, which offer messaging and some Web browsing, but not a fully open mobile experience.
As I said back in 2007,
Android isn't an end-to-end open mobile experience; it's an OS that
carriers and manufacturers are free to alter or lock down however they
like. Perhaps a conflict between carriers, manufacturers and Google is one of the things that has held up the release of more Android phones.
At Android's launch in 2007, Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressed disbelief that his OS would be used to create locked-down devices - but he's said that it's possible. And insiders I've spoken to have said that one of Android's growing pains has been the process of Google figuring out how much control they want to exert over the platform.
We've seen the first, rather innocuous carrier alterations in the new HTC Android phones for Rogers Wireless; by adding Microsoft Exchange support, Rogers forfeited the Google logo. It'll be very interesting to see what truly aggressive carrier customization does to the Android platform.
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