Acer Joins Android Phone Club

[savramesh 37]

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New Delhi: After HTC and Samsung, now Taiwanese electronics giant Acer has decided to throw its weight behind Google’s Android platform with the launch of Liquid. The company became the third brand to diversify its smartphone portfolio from Windows Mobile to the linux-based open operating system. Liquid is based on Qualcomm’s 1Ghz Snapdragon processor.

“We like the platform because it is open and has an application store and a large number of developers working on it,” said Richard Tan, head of Acer’s handheld division in India.

The shift in loyalties by Taiwanese mobile-phone makers is ominous for Microsoft, which practically invented the ‘smartphone’ category. It has steadily lost its market share under a sustained onslaught by Nokia-supported Symbian and Canadian smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the Blackberry series.

Taiwanese manufacturers, particularly HTC, have traditionally been the ‘third front’ in the global smartphone industry. Being largely focused on hardware, they had tapped windows mobile to fulfil their software needs.

However, with Windows Mobile market share dipping from more than 52% in 2006 to around 9% last year, most seemed to be jumping ships to the Google platform.

HTC, which used to make more Windows Mobile phones than all other vendors put together, has already based around half of its new models launching this year on Android.

Tan, however, said it would require more to make Acer take a drastic switch. “I would not say that we are shifting primarily to Android,” he said. “Because we have to first gauge the consumer reception for this product.”

In line with global numbers, India currently has six Android phones, including two by the Korean giant Samsung which has the lion’s share of India’s touchscreen phone market, starting from around Rs 14,000 for the HTC Spica.

Besides the ‘appstore’ made popular by Apple, companies are shifting to Android also because it is more squarely focused on the consumer market, says mobile aficionado and the editor of Cell Passion, Rajat Agarwal.

“You could perhaps say that Windows Mobile has failed to grow beyond its enterprise roots,” says Rajat, pointing out that WinMo, as the platform is known in the circles, is perceived as too complex for average phone consumers to use.

“The price of smartphones have dropped to such an extent that it has invaded the realm of the ‘consumer phone’ from being a primarily enterprise or geek device,” he points out. “However, it may be too early to write off WinMo, since they are coming up with a new, reworked version at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month,” he pointed out.

For consumers, Android on their phone means slightly longer battery life, a Google-supported store to download ‘funky’ applications from and state-of-the-art design and interface.

Unlike WinMo, Android is opensource and therefore freely redistributable without paying royalties or license fees. More such models are expected to hit the market, including a blackberry-like device from Acer and new models from Asus, HTC and LG. Most are expected to unveil their new collection at the congress.