Android is a pretty fair business bet

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

Yesterday was arguably the first significant tech announcement for 2009 with HTC, Google and Optus announcing the G1 Dream phone will be available in Australia later this month. The announcement was nowhere near as hyped Apple's iPhone launch last year (is anything more hyped that Apple product launches?), but it doesn't need to be as there are compelling technology reasons that will make Android a success, particularly in the business market.

At the press event, I asked HTC's local director Anthony Petts what he expected the G1's uptake to be like in the business market, and what the “split” between business and consumer users might be.

Without going out on a limb and declaring any one type of user will flock to the Dream, Anthony was confident the new phone would appeal equally to both markets.

For consumers there's the “Internet experience” of the G1 and its integrated Google apps, and for businesses its the open platform that can run any type of custom application.

He best summed it up like this.

“The Dream can be customised for what I want to do, and not what someone else wants me to do.”

I then asked about the Androids software delivery capabilities and whether that could be leveraged for internal enterprise applications.

Use your imagination. If you are a transport company and need to deploy your parcel tracking app to 500 G1s, why not use the Android Market for software delivery and updates? You could, but that's not ideal if you want to keep your app in-house only.

In response to the question an Android developer present spoke up and said business apps don't need to be public to be deployable across an organisation. Sweet.

One that that wasn't made clear was whether a business was forced to use the Android Market for software delivery, be it internal or public.

Perhaps some server software could accomplish the task quite easily, or even better just use some existing tools like rsync or http, which the Linux-based Android should already support.

As I've blogged about previously, this is where Android has the advantage over the iPhone. Business adoption of the iPhone has been good, but I wouldn't say it's been revolutionary. And there's definitely still a huge market for a more open competitor.

Let the competition of Android begin!