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Google, Verizon Team Up on Smartphones

Move to Android seen as real challenge to iPhone, BlackBerry

By Harry Kimball, Newser Staff

Posted Oct 7, 2009 9:33 AM CDT

(Newser) – Google and Verizon will partner on a line of smartphones and software running the search giant’s Android OS and served by the carrier. Verizon is the largest-yet wireless network to back Google, and the announcement could complicate what was once a simple smartphone rivalry between Apple and BlackBerry, BusinessWeek reports. Analysts expect a handful of Android phones by the likes of Motorola and Samsung by month’s end.

Incredibly, analysts believe up to 30 devices could debut by the end of the year, and some think Verizon will push the phones ahead of BlackBerrys and others. One selling point for buyers is Google’s app store, Android Market. Though there are now only a rather anemic 10,000 applications—Apple has 85,000—with Verizon’s 87.7 million users that number could skyrocket. Verizon’s gamesmanship with Apple—it has sought to carry the iPhone—is not lost on watchers. The move reads “We are not desperate,” one says.

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A Verizon store in New York. (AP Photo)

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, left, and Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Wireless. (AP Photo)

Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of Motorola Mobile Devices, holds up a new Android-based Motorola Cliq during a mobile Internet conference in San Francisco, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

A prototype mobile phone loaded with Google's Android OS at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

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They are showing Apple: "If we don't get the iPhone, we have all this other stuff; we are not desperate." - Tero Kuittinen, MKM Partners

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Google, Verizon Team Up on Smartphones