MWC: Google still open to Nokia

The Google CEO held out an olive branch of peace to Nokia in his keynote address at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday reports MATT ABLOTT . However the CEO was more interested in talking about the impact of cloud computing, 4G networks and, of course, the role of Android in this new world.

In his keynote address at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said little on the recent Nokia/Microsoft deal that is aiming to become a major challenger to Android, except for a brief acknowledgement of regret that Nokia had opted to go with Google’s greatest rival.

‚We would have loved Nokia to have chosen Android and our offer remains open.‚ Schmidt paid more attention to the rollout of LTE – or 4G – networks and new cloud based services this year, which he said would mark the start of a new era for mobile innovation.

‚LTE will provide the platform for a set of new mobile applications that we can only begin to imagine,‚ said Schmidt in a special keynote session at Congress yesterday afternoon.

Not surprisingly, he positioned Google’s own Android OS as at the forefront of this change. He said that Android phone activations were now running at more than 300,000 a day with 170 Android based handsets currently available from 27 device vendors -making it the ‚world’s fastest-growing mobile platform.‚ He claimed that such scale made Android a compelling prospect for developers. ‚Developers think ‚mobile first’ because they know this is where there is scale and growth: they also go where the money is.‚

As well as benefiting from Google’s advertising businesses, developers can also tap into YouTube ‚ which Schmidt said was now recording 35 hours of video uploads every minute. There are now 150,000 apps on the Android store, said Schmidt, a tally that has tripled in the last nine months. However, he was forced to defend suggestions that Android represented a fragmented apps environment for developers to work on, claiming that Google enforces so-called ‚antifragmentation laws‚ for vendors licensing the platform.

Schmidt was joined on stage by a Google engineer who demonstrated the forthcoming ‚Honeycomb‚ Android version (3.0) running on a Motorola XOOM tablet. Google showed off a new Android app called ‚Movie Studio,’ which allows users to record, edit and distribute movies directly from a tablet.

– Story courtesy Mobile World Congress Show Daily