OStatic

First rule of public relations: Don't make an announcement when it's going to be drowned out by competing announcements you can't hope to beat. The Wholesale Applications Community announcement put out yesterday was up against not one, but two mobile announcements guaranteed to steal its thunder: Windows 7 Mobile and the MeeGo announcement from Nokia and Intel.

Setting aside the bad timing, let's look at the actual initiative. What is the Wholesale Applications Community? A major initiative from a gaggle of telecom operators to build an open platform for mobile phone users. It combines 24 operators, including AT&T, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and many others, with device manufacturers LG Electronics, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The group's mission is to create a wholesale app ecosystem for deployment across all carriers and devices, rather than the fragmented ecosystem that we have now with apps for various phones and carriers.

When Google unveiled its mobile operating system and christened it Android, some said it would never go anywhere. When the company announced the Android Developer Challenge and laid out $10 million to kick-start application development, a number of critics declared it a waste of good money.

And when the Android Market made its debut, just days before the release of the first Android phone, many scoffed at the fifty-odd applications available. Today, however, it's Google's turn to chuckle, as the number of available apps steamed past twenty thousand.

When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

?In October, the Symbian Foundation released the Symbian kernel sources to the world, and the rest of the world (read: developers) collectively responded, Great. Where's my Android phone? I've often lauded Google for its ability to fuse the marketing, PR and developer benefits of open source projects into one seemless operation. It would seem that Symbian could stand to learn a few things. The question is, is it too late?

On October 24th, as Lisa reported, a serious vulnerability was discovered in the Google Android powered G1 mobile phone.

Though security researchers classified the flaw in the Android browser as serious, Google assured users that the risk wasn't necessarily as dire as it seemed, due to the way the Android operating system restricts each application to its own area.

CNet News reporter Stephen Shankland says his G1 was patched on Saturday through a quick system update.

The Google Android SDK, released yesterday, confirmed what had been long been rumored: Google's mobile platform uses WebKit, an open source browser engine . We have been working on our mobile implementation of WebKit for quite some time, ...