Australian telecommunications companies would be able to start selling Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies' Android-based phones by the third quarter of 2009 if they wanted to, the company said this week.
Huawei entered the Android open handset alliance earlier this week, announcing plans to launch smartphones running Google's new mobile operating system next year.
There would be no launch apartheid where some nations were excluded from the first round of access to the phone, according to a spokesperson, who told ZDNet.com.au that if Australia got the phone later it would be the choice of the telcos and not Huawei.
"Huawei can confirm that their first Android smartphone is scheduled to launch in the third quarter of 2009. Huawei's smartphones can be ordered and developed for Australian operators based on any such requests," the spokesperson said.
Last week, Huawei formally joined Google's Open Handset Alliance, along with 13 other companies including Garmin International and Vodafone.
Other Android phones include HTC's Dream and Kogan Technologies' Agora, which will hit Australia on January 29.
Suzanne Tindal of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.
Google on Monday released the first beta version of its software developer kit (SDK) for Android phones, a significant step in the company's hope for "open" phone technology.
Google, which is leading the 34-company Open Handset Alliance to create the largely open-source Android software stack for mobile devices, already had released an "early look" SDK in November 2007. With the new beta SDK, though, the company is telling programmers they can get started in earnest creating software that will work on Android phones due to start shipping later this year, though stopping short of promising full compatibility.
"Since this is a beta release, applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0," Google developer advocate Dan Morrill said in a blog post.
Google's promised advantages of Android.
(Credit: Google)Among changes in the new SDK are the addition of the phone's new home screen as well as some new applications for controlling the camera, playing music, setting alarms, viewing pictures, and dealing with SMS and MMS messages.
Android phones, notably HTC's Dream, are due to ship in the fourth quarter.
Google had hinted in May that the new Android SDK was imminent, but the company ended up sharing it only with finalists in an Android programming contest until Monday. The Android Developer Challenge is awarding $10 million to coders to try to jump-start development efforts; on Monday, Google said a second challenge will be announced later this year that "will give developers a chance to build polished applications once hardware is available."
Google hopes Android phones will be open to run innumerable applications, not just locked down to handle a relatively small number of authorized packages. To achieve this promise though, one key step is helping programmers to write that code. And SDK does just that, for example, by providing a software emulator that can run Android applications without an actual Android phone.
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