Giant Realm and Google Android

**Note: Technical difficulties are delaying the Economics of the Candidates series. I’m doing my best to hurry the process.**

Expanding beyond the world of Escapist writing, I have landed a position as an occasional editorialist for Giant Realm, a site for “Stuff That Doesn’t Suck.”

With such a descriptive caption, one might not understand that it’s a growing editorial portal with plenty of entertaining articles about music, movies, technology and gaming, all interests of ours. I joined Giant Realm to work for my former Escapist editor Joe Blancato, who left to become this site’s Editor-in-Chief. Joe’s an entertaining guy, promising some great content and making this site worth visiting.

My first story is details Google’s Android project, an open-source phone operating system that will debut with T-Mobile this year. I could explain more on my site, but I figure I’ll pimp Giant Realm and ask you to read the blurb below and then go read the full article:

The saga of Android, Google’s answer to the iPhone, started at technology’s ground zero – post-dotcom bubble Silicon Valley.

Andy Rubin, founder of Android Inc., met with Google big wig Larry Page in 2005 to make his pitch. Rubin wanted to make a Linux-based, open-source mobile platform. He, essentially, was plotting to create the holy grail of the telecommunications business: a single platform that would unify developers, hardware manufacturers and consumers. Page was well aware of the opportunities that waited in tapping the ever-growing mobile market, especially for Google, who could make a pretty penny pushing advertising to phones. Once the inadequacies of cell phone systems were solved, consumers would be increasingly willing to spend time surfing the web wirelessly. Then Google and Android would be free to roll around in all the ad dollars that came pouring in.

What the world needed, Google surmised, was a universal operating system. Unlike Apple’s closed iPhone platform, anyone could access Android’s planned OS, allowing for complex applications on a broader range of phone hardware. The biggest challenge to coders who create software for mobile phones is making their programs work on the thousands of different handsets currently on the market. They spend so much time porting their work over and over again that they hardly have the time or budget to make good software. But Google and Android had loftier goals.