First glimpse of Google’s Android

A handful of chip-makers at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona showed on Monday how a mobile device running Google’s mobile operating system, Android, might look.“It’s definitely very promising,” an analyst for technology research firm Gartner, Carolina Milanesi, said. “This means that we should be on track to see commercial devices in the second half of 2008.”With 30 phone, chip and software companies behind it, Google launched Android last year hoping to establish it as the standard operating system for mobile phones and to improve their quality of Web-browsing.Texas Instruments Inc, the largest maker of chips for cell phones, showed its prototype offering “one-button access” to Web-browsing, email, messaging and video.“The future ability of Android is exciting because it’s open-source, so it allows developers to come up with the next killer application,” said a company spokesman.Google said the demonstrations were “exactly the kind of momentum we hoped the announcement and the platform would generate.”