SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones) --The head of Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Android software unit paid a few unexpected compliments to mobile competitors and said his business would be profitable if it was a stand-alone company.
"We're profitable. I probably wouldn't have made it as a separate company," said Vice President Andy Rubin, who joined Google when the Internet search giant bought his mobile software startup about five years ago.
Rubin made his comments during a wide-ranging interview that covered privacy, tablet computers and the failed Nexus One phone at the opening of the All Things Digital Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco.
Rubin's made his appearance just hours after the Internet search giant unveiled its new Nexus S smartphone. The Nexus S is powered by a new version--dubbed Gingerbread--of Google's Android software, the centerpiece of the Internet giant's assault on Apple Inc.'s iPhone.
Android is designed to ensure that Google's Internet search, maps and other services will be a mainstay on mobile devices. The company sells ads alongside its Internet search results and helps place ads within mobile-device applications such as games.
The company said in October that its mobile business had hit a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, a bid to quell Wall Street concerns that the company's aggressive investments might not be paying off.
Rubin also showed off a Motorola Inc. (MOT) prototype tablet powered by an upcoming version of Android--dubbed Honeycomb--which will be optimized to run on tablet devices.
He said tablet computers represented a fundamental change in the way people interact computers, likening the shift to the slow evolution of the automobile over decades.
"With the tablet, we're in the middle of one of those hockey sticks of evolution," he said.
Rubin dismissed concerns that Android enabled Google or carriers to track people as they moved about the web and the physical world. While he acknowledged that privacy is valid concern, he said Android does not capture any more information about users' online behavior than Google's search engine does on people's desktop computers.
He added that there is nothing in Android that captures people's keystrokes or records the apps they download in order to send it Google. Asked whether carriers might tweak Android in such a fashion, he said: "Not to my knowledge. Its something I would agree to either."
Rubin surprised the audience by praising rival Apple's app store approval process. "They're pretty open," he said. "The app store approval process is actually working pretty well."
He also noted that Apple appears to increasingly pushing beyond selling devices into providing services, such as selling books through its web store, a push that will create a lot of new opportunities.
When it was noted that Apple's Mobile Me, a service that lets users sync their email, contacts and calendar across all devices, has failed to take off, Rubin replied: "My assumption is that Apple is a company that learns from its mistakes."
Rubin also gave a nod to BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), which is losing ground to Apple and Android. He noted that RIM has recently acquired a number of companies, most recent the user interface specialist The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), in a bid to close the gap.
"They are doing all the right things to fill in all the right pieces to keep up with the hyper-competitive market," he said.
Rubin deflected questions about the potential that RIM and Nokia might adopt Android, but said there was nothing to stop them from doing so.
"You don't need to be a partner of Google to run Android," he said.
Android, the No. 3 mobile operating system in the U.S. as of October, is quickly gaining on Apple and RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry, according to research firm comScore Inc.
Google's Nexus S follows its short-lived effort to market a handset called the Nexus One, which was released in January and discontinued in the summer. That phone was only sold directly to consumers through a Google Web store in a bid to side-step the traditional model of sales through carriers.
Rubin acknowledged to the audience that Google "bit off a little more than we could chew" by trying to sell the unlocked phone online. He said the attempt to drive online phone sales was foiled by the sheer size of the challenge of provisioning unlocked phones so they would work on various carriers.
"It was a scale issue," he said. "It was going to take literally three months to do every carrier."
The new gingerbread software includes support for so-called near field communications technology. Such technology can enable third-party developers to create mobile payment applications so users can use their phones as digital wallets.
Rubin told audience members that Google is taking "baby steps" to make Android more suitable for corporate use, adding that each successive version of the software will feature more support for IT managers.
Copyright © 2010 Dow Jones Newswires
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