HTC Succeed with its Own Open Source Mobile OS?

Is it too late for a new open source mobile operating system to compete with Android? OStatic has made the point many times that Android has reached an incredible volume of welcome in a very short time. After all, in March of 2009, when only one Android handset was shown at Mobile World Congress, many analysts wondered if the OS was dead coming out of the gate. Android's meteoric success since then also coincided with multiple dropped balls from Symbian in trying to open source its once hugely powerful mobile platform. Now that HP has taken its foot of the gas with its WebOS platform, Android doesn't really have clear open source competition anymore. That could still change, though.

There have been many reports that Google wants to "supercharge" its Android efforts through , which puts Google squarely in the handset and hardware mobile business. At the same time, though, hardware players who have adopted Android have to wonder whether they'll become second-class citizens as Google steers new versions of Android toward its own phones and its own plans.

HTC is one of those hardware players to have made huge bets on Android, many of them successful. Now, HTC officials have come out and said they are interested in buying an operating system, and it would be smart for HTC to pursue its own open source mobile OS. Cher Wang, chairwoman of HTC, has pointed particularly to the possibility of HTC buying WebOS. In this post, she is quoted as saying: