Google and 33 other companies have announced an ambitious industry alliance that will maintain a completely open source mobile phone stack. The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) says phones based on its Linux-based "Android" stack will reach market in as soon as eight months.

While Google and its Open Handset Alliance partners would have us believe that it's all about the customer, the Android open source mobile platform is as much about preventing Microsoft, Symbian and Palm from taking up the top position in the mobile operating system space.

There's been a flurry of excitement about open source in the mobile world in the past few weeks, what with Google's Open Handset Alliance and its associated Android software platform. In all the hype (some deserved, some not), people seem to have forgotten one Very Big Problem in mobile...

Japanese embedded specialist ACCESS has joined the Open Handset Alliance and released its first application for Android, an implementation of the Graffiti text entry system from the Palm PDA

The media is absolutely filled with “oh noes” stories concerning Google, and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance, being sued by Erich Specht of Palatine, Ill over its use of the word Android to describe its mobile phones.

It has been roughly four months since Red Hat, Synnex, Alfresco, EnterpriseDB and other open source companies unveiled the Open Source Channel Alliance. The effort aims to promote open source applications and Linux to IT consultants, integrators and resellers. Here are the top three questions I plan to pose to the alliance on Aug. 3.

Your editor was recently amused to encounter this ZDNet article on "Android's dirty little secret." According to that article, the openness of Android has led to anincrease in the control held by handset manufacturers and wireless carriers and the fragmentation of the platform.

I've been following Android since its inception in November 2007. I'm referring to the open source Linux-based software platform for mobile devices developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance.Everyone was talking about Android back then that I even made a post about it and defended it against a negative comment made by a well-known blogger.

Android 2.0 (formerly codenamed 'Éclair') is the latest evolution of the mobile OS developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. This version is a chunky upgrade, superceding the current Android 1.6 software (dubbed 'Donut'), which was actually considered "a minor platform release".