The first phones using Google’s Android platform were meant to go to market by the second half of this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, Google is facing some major setbacks thanks to the intricacies of the cell phone business.
Google had planned to launch the first Android handsets with the help of T-Mobile USA in the second half of this year. While this launch is still going forward as planned, the WSJ reports that T-Mobile is taking up so many of Google’s resources that other partners such as Sprint will have to delay the launch of Android on their network. Thanks to this delay, Sprint is now even considering to delay the release of an Android phone until it has hardware available to run it on its 4G network instead.
In the international market, Google is also facing a number of problems. China Mobile apparently has problems translating the Android software into Chinese characters.
Unlike Apple, which put a lot of pressure on AT&T to retain control of both the hardware and software, Google is pursuing a different strategy by just providing the software platform and leaving everything else to the hardware manufacturers and network providers.
This news is definitely coming at a bad time for Google. Apple is set to release the next version of its iPhone on July 11th and a lot of buyers who were in the market for a modern smartphone and considered waiting for an Android phone might now move to an Apple or Blackberry device instead.
