The Mobile Web Tablet

Bugs in Android? Photo.

Via MobileCrunch:

Samsung delaying Android offering until late 2009
If you were holding your breath until MWC to see if Samsung would drop its promised Android-based phone, you can exhale. It seems that the Samdroid will have to wait, as they’re still in negotiations with carriers and no hardware has been put forth. Shucks!

How much trouble is there in Android-land? I have gone from sceptic to fanboy and back to a somewhat sceptical position again over the last couple of months.

We’re still waiting for an Android announcement from one of the-five-big-ones-that’s-not-from-Finland. Meanwhile, rumours mixed with official announcements are coming from Asus, Dell and portable media player company Archos to name just a few.

Going from one device to many, from different companies, on different hardware, will be a huge challenge for the untested OS. We’ll see if the mighty Android is up to the task.

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That last post got me thinking. The fact that I can’t get the name of any person calling me by having the phone hooking up to a web service and looking up the name from the phone number is such a sure sign of how far from The Mobile Web we really are that I’m going to make this my Mobile Web latmus test:

When I can buy a phone from the major vendors (LG, SEMC, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung) that, without me installing any special software, does that for me, then we’re there.

The web and the telecom industry will finally have merged. The telecom industry gets it and the web industry has the tools available to make it happen. Until then, we’re really only playing around. It’s like the PC-industry before Windows 3.1. The internet before Netscape. It hasn’t happened yet.

I’m guessing it’s about 2-3 years away.

By the way, does the iPhone support that? Anyone know?

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