Love that Creating a Story for Droid Changed Loathing to Love: How the Android Ecosystem Threatens the iPhone | via Wired

By Fred Vogelstein

Andy Rubin needed a hit. It was January 2009, three years since Google had bought the company he cofounded, a little startup called Android.

Rubin had created a slick operating system for mobile phones that allowed customers to surf the web, send email, play music, and install apps. He had hoped that Google’s money and power would help turn Android into a major force in the burgeoning smartphone industry. Instead, Android had been a disappointment. Despite months of press buildup, the first phone to run the system, HTC’s T-Mobile G1, was greeted with tepid reviews and lackluster sales. Rubin had tried to find a bigger wireless carrier that would agree to partner with Android—he and his team, including Android cofounders Rich Miner and Nick Sears, had lobbied Verizon for the better part of a year—but without success. And then there was Android’s biggest competitor, the iPhone. Introduced in 2007, it had become an instant commercial and cultural phenomenon. Unless Rubin could come up with a breakthrough Android phone, and quick, he might have to concede the entire business to Steve Jobs.

Fortunately for Rubin, Sanjay Jha was in just as dire a position. Jha, the new co-CEO of Motorola, had been talking to Rubin for months, hoping to persuade him to let Motorola build the next Android phone. Once the dominant mobile device maker in the world, Motorola hadn’t had a major success since the Razr—in 2004. Jha had been hired in August 2008 to resurrect Motorola’s handset business, and he had pursued an all-or-nothing strategy, laying off thousands and betting Motorola’s future on his ability to build a hit Android phone.

Now Jha had come to Google headquarters to unveil his design—and it was impressive. Jha promised a device that would be far faster than any other smartphone. He said its touchscreen would have a higher resolution than the iPhone. He said it would come with a full keyboard, for customers who didn’t like the iPhone’s virtual keys. He promised a phone that was thin and sleek, one that could compete with the iPhone on pure aesthetics. And, thanks to his longstanding relationship with Verizon, he offered the potential of a partnership with the country’s then second-largest wireless carrier; in fact, Motorola and Verizon had already discussed building a smartphone together. “We were all kind of jazzed,” says Hiroshi Lockheimer, one of Rubin’s chief lieutenants, who was at the meeting. “I think we said OK on the spot.”

Motorola came back with the first prototype of the new Android phone. It was hideous.

But that optimism faded a few months later, in the spring of 2009, when the first prototype arrived in the Android offices. To Rubin’s eyes, they looked nothing like the designs Jha had presented. Indeed, they were hideous. Yes, there is always a gap between a manufacturer’s sketches and the eventual prototype, but Rubin and his team had so much faith in Jha that they expected him to deliver a phone much closer to the one he had pitched. Despair set in. “It looked like a weapon. It was so sharp and jagged and full of hard lines. It looked like you could cut yourself on the edges,” says someone who saw the prototype. “We were really concerned. There were a lot of conversations where we asked, ‘Is this really the device we want to do? Should we try to talk Motorola out of it?’”

via wired.com

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