A UBS analyst has confirmed that Taiwanese handset manufacturer HTC will ship about 50,000 cell phones running on a mobile operating system made by Google. The phones are reportedly going to ship by the end of this year. But the phones will only be going to development partners. The move would suggest that Google is more interested in an operating system for mobile devices than making actual devices itself, as most observers would guess, if given a choice between those two avenues as most likely.
But development of the operating system does not preclude the possibility that Google might want to have its own name plate on devices built on the operating system.
“These initial phones are not going to be for sale,” says Benjamin Schachter, UBS analyst.
