With Android, Google is seeking to counter other mobile phone platforms like Microsoft's Windows Mobile, RIM's BlackBerry and most importantly, Apple's iPhone.
To counter competition from mobile phone operators like China Unicom and China Mobile (Hong Kong), China Telecom offers a cordless phone service known as Little Smart in northern cities like Tianjin and Chengde that lets users make calls within cities.
But still, 500 quid is a lot of cash to lay down up front and runs counter to British mobile culture where we are very accustomed to subsidized handsets and lengthy contracts.
Critics counter that it allows mobile operators to pick winners and makes it more difficult for others to compete; for that reason, the Slovenian and the Dutch regulators recently banned certain forms of zero-rating.
My hope is that Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile will counter by cutting the price of their data plans for other computing devices.
Charles Darwin thought they were relatives of mollusks; in the mid-1800s, howeveRussianian biologist Alexander Kowalevsky countered that the mobile tunicate larva, with its dorsal cartilaginous column resembling a spine, should be grouped with vertebrates and not clams and snails--even though the adult never develop a backbone.
He must find blockbuster mobile games to counter the threat posed by upstarts like King.com.
Apple's strategy of creating a custom chip for mobile devices runs counter to its approach in computers in which it purchases chips from Intel.
Others counter that as computing goes mobile, it favours information-technology firms that have invested in research for years and that Google was naive or idealistic to broaden its IT business without having a stack of patents.
Its pay TV arm, Canal Plus, added subscribers after Vivendi bought exclusive rights to broadcast the top soccer league, part of a strategy to expand in media and counter slowing growth in its mobile phone unit, SFR.
