Google has formed an alliance with 33 firms to develop an open platform for mobile phones, called Android. Google hopes to reinvent both cell phones and the entire cell phone industry with this software, but Google’s mammoth share in the Web-advertising business causes some people to view a venture as sweeping as Android with suspicion.
John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at Symbian, the platform that powers many of the world’s phones, said Google lacked experience. Symbian OS powers more than 165 million phones. Google’s dominance of the web will not translate to the mobile phone market, a senior executive at Symbian has said.
