Korean Partners Cautious on Google Phone Project
By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Korean partners of Google's mobile platform consortium have remained cautious about its aftereffects, saying nothing has been decided yet as to what the Google Phone will look like and how it will differ from conventional phones.
On Monday, Google announced that it and 33 other firms from around the world have teamed up for the ``Android" project with a goal to ``market innovative new products faster and at much lower costs'' than existing mobile phones. Korea's Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics joined as major partners in the Android team, but they said that they have little idea about how and what they will be making as members of the alliance.
``Today's announcement is more ambitious than any single `Google Phone' that the press has been speculating about over the past few weeks,'' said Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt. ``Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models.''
Samsung and LG Electronics said that they are waiting to get more information from Google.
``We have just decided to join. The platform itself is not in a complete form,'' an LG spokesman said on Tuesday, adding that it will take between six to 10 months to develop a new handset using Google's Android platform.
``Only the big picture was drawn. We don't know whether the system will be used in only smartphones, or they will be implemented in ordinary phones, too,'' a Samsung spokesman said.
Google has been rumored to have the ambition to sell a ``gPhone'' because it was stimulated by the success of Apple iPhone this year. But in Monday's announcement, the Internet giant implied that it will only provide the necessary software such as the operating system (OS) and other applications, while the task of developing hardware will be left to the traditional phone manufacturers and parts makers.
In general, the firm said, the new Android platform will give more flexibility to hardware manufacturers and mobile service carriers in designing their products and services, who will in turn be able to offer a diverse lineup of cheaper, more innovative and easier-to-use mobile phones to consumers.
For phone makers, the alliance is generally considered as a golden opportunity to narrow the widening gap with the market leader Nokia or even to catch up with it in the long run. Nokia has excluded itself from the Android project because it has its own OS for mobile phones, called Symbian. Symbian is currently sharing the mobile OS market with Microsoft's Windows Mobile program.
Telecom companies in Korea, however, have shown a cooler reaction to the Google project because they worry that selling cheaper and more versatile phones in Korea can damage their profits from additional services like e-mail, games and mobile Internet, for which they are charging heavy fees.
``We will wait and see how the situation develops,'' said a spokeswoman at SK Telecom, the leading telecom company. ``We do not know what will be the benefits of the Google phone,'' she said, adding that Google has never had impressive results in Korea even though it is big in other countries.
Many foreign telecom firms were more open and audacious than Korean telecom firms in making investments. Major carriers in Japan (NTT DoCoMo), China (Mobile China), the Untied States (Sprint) and Germany (T-Mobile) are founding members of the Google Android Alliance and they promised to deploy the first Google Phones in Europe and North America first in the second half of next year.