Andy Rubin: Android Was Originally Designed For Cameras

You may know a little about the Samsung Galaxy Camera, a dedicated point-and-shoot device that runs Android which was one of our go-to gadgets at CES this year. However, did you know that Android was actually meant to run on such a device after all? Andy Rubin, who recently stepped down as Google's Android chief, revealed that original designs of Android were catered towards cameras, not smartphones.

Speaking at an economic summit in Tokyo, Rubin revealed that when Google acquired Android in 2005, the original plan was to create a camera platform with a cloud service for storing photos online. However, since digital camera growth was starting to level off and the market wasn't all that large, Google decided to implement the software in mobile phones, which were taking off at the time.

What's perhaps most interesting is that Google didn't really need to change much of anything with Android in order to cater it toward mobile phones, rather than cameras. Rubin says that "the exact same platform, the exact same operating system" was simply just transfered over to handsets instead of digital cameras.

This essentially means that the Samsung Galaxy Camera is possibly a very good example of what Android was originally meant to be. And it certainly makes sense because we really enjoyed the Galaxy Camera, and we think that Android actually fits right at home on digital cameras.

[via PC World]