Motorola paranoid over Android box

Set-top speculation spiked

Posted in Mobile, 21st April 2009 12:20 GMT

Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

Motorola has denied putting Google's Android onto a set-top box, pointing out that their "au" box is still running their own proprietary OS, despite reports to the contrary.

EE Times reported that Motorola was working on an Android box, which Android Guys then identified as the "au Box", which can synchronise content with mobile phones and is supplied by Japanese network operator KDDI.

But it seems the connection was spurious, and Motorola has sent us a statement making it clear the company has no plans to extend Android into the set-top box sphere.

In some ways it's surprising that Motorola is so adamantly sticking to its proprietary platforms, when the mobile division has bet its future on Android. But the benefits of using an open OS are less obvious in the set-top world, and Motorola's platform is already Linux-based, so reaping many of the advantages of Open Source.

So despite its promise Android remains on one mobile phone, for the moment, though the spread to more handsets and other consumer devices is a question of when rather than if, as this demonstration of Android running on a netbook demonstrates. ®