The Open Handset Alliance

As a college student, I spend plenty of my time in class where my cell phone needs to be silent. However, the vibration mode is not desirable while in my dorm or outside. So, I am forced to manually switch between modes a number of times daily.

While this is obviously not an enormous burden, one might easily imagine a cell phone application which would mute one's phone during certain times each day. Weekly staff meetings would not be interrupted; classes would proceed without punctuation from an errant ring tone.

However, the locked down cell phones which permeate the American market make this entrepreneurial task an impossible one. The omnipresent mobile phones (of which there are 3 billion globally), remain a closed platform. This limits innovation in the form of new applications.

Led by Google, the new Open Handset Alliance seeks to upset this status quo by providing a platform for development on mobile phones. Major industry members including Motorola, HTC, Sprint & T-Mobile are joining forces to end the prohibitive mobile market.

Notably absent, however, are the largest cell phone carriers, Verizon and ATT, who will still have the ability to lock-in customers through artificial market barriers like they do with the iPhone or other handsets. Yet, this is undoubtedly a powerful step towards making mobile computing more like Internet computing and the members should be applauded for their leadership.