WSJ Story on the Delay of Google’s Android Launch

Jessica E. Vascellaro and Amol Sharma, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The Internet giant and more than 30 partners announced in November a bold plan for a new breed of handsets based on a suite of mobile software called Android. At the time, Google said it planned to have the new phones on the market by the second half of this year.

Google now says that the handsets won’t arrive until the fourth quarter. And some cellular carriers and makers of programs that work with Android are struggling to meet that schedule, people familiar with the situation say.

The problem with vaporware announcements is that what seems “close” to being launched often isn’t. Apple pre-announced the iPhone six months in advance, but at that time, they had the hardware specs nailed down and a credible version of the software up and running. Some of the iPhone apps weren’t implemented yet, but most were. And the iPhone team had to work its ass off to finish the remaining work to get them into stores on June 29.

We still haven’t seen an Android phone that’s as far along as the six-months-away-from-shipping iPhone that was unveiled at Macworld in January 2007.

★ Monday, 23 June 2008