Google's consortium of Android partners, the Open Handset Alliance, has stayed stable at 34 companies for months, but Espelien expects it to grow.

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Google has assembled a coalition of more than 30 companies, collectively known as the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), that have pledged to bring Android to market.

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Google culled the judges from Open Handset Alliance member companies.

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It's also the year the Open Handset Alliance was announced.

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If you really want to get serious, pedal your steam-engine over to the Open Handset Alliance site where you can download the SDK for a variety of platforms.

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Google's mobile software is based on the Linux operating system and was created in conjunction with a group of more than 30 technology companies called the Open Handset Alliance.

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He focuses ( again) on the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which OEMs agree to when they work with the platform, promising to keep Android a happy (and relatively compatible) platform.

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Even if it uses Android as a base, one has to assume that if Facebook makes a phone, it will want to have more control than allowed as part of Google's Open Handset Alliance.

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Otherwise developers would have to buy all these handsets to test their applications--a problem that Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) hopes to stamp out with its "Open Handset Alliance" and development platform.

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