David Flynn18 February 2009, 8:00 AM
Telstra reveals to APC that it will release an Android phone on Next G before the year is out.
Mobile World Congress, Barcelona | Telstra has revealed to APC that it plans to release an Android phone in the second half of the year.
Speaking to APC at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a senior Telstra executive said the carrier would release an Android smartphone on its Next G network “in the second half of the year”.
Ross Fielding, Telstra’s Executive Director of Product Management, also said that Telstra would invest in writing software for the open source OS which would provide the smartphone with easy access to Telstra’s content and services.
“We invest a lot of money in our content and our services, for example we have our own consumer email offering, so we don’t want a phone that’s tied to a certain service and tells the customer ‘you have to have this’” Fielding told APC.
“We have to make sure the handset supports our Telstra services as well as the other things. The first versions (of the HTC Android phones) were tied to Gmail, and that’s not our strategy.”
Asked if this meant Telstra writing its own Linux software or even a customised UI layer for the device, Fielding said that “if you wanted to do something on (Android) that’s the most logical thing to do – you’d build something on top of it. So that’s the development path we’ll go down”.
However, while Fielding says he has seen HTC’s second-gen
Magic Android handset, there was no guarantee that HTC would get the nod. “We’re partners with HTC, but we’ll be talking to all of our many partners”.
David Flynn is attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as a guest of Microsoft.