It goes without saying that Google wants to beat Apple in the smartphone space. While it definitely does so in some areas – like adoption rate for instance – the ugly issue of fragmentation often rears its head. To try and combat this and control what hardware manufacturers are using, there are reports that Google is exploring the option of having a chip manufacturer make various smartphone components designed by Google itself, much like what Apple does with the Ax chips, which are manufactured by Samsung.
The story goes that Google had started discussions this fall (northern hemisphere) to potentially make a whole device in-house at Google – the benefit of this is obvious, with Google able to build a system that could be better integrated with Android. The obvious pitfall in this plan is finding the right manufacturer with most of the big manufacturers reluctant to surrender their competitive edge to Google – settling for a lower tier manufacturer might not be an option for Google if producing cutting edge devices is their intention. Of course, there are ways to do this – it’s possible that Google mandates that future Nexus manufacturers choose the components that Google specifies, though it will be interesting to see which manufacturer would be willing to play along with that plan.
What do you think about Google making their own hardware? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: The Information via The Verge
