How Android rose to prominence in the smartphone market.
In 2007, many pundits were expressing disappointment that Google was only releasing an open-source mobile operating system rather than a smartphone of its own design to compete with Apple's just-released first-generation iPhone. Less than three years later, Android has become one of the dominant players in the mobile operating system market, so much so that when Google finally did release a phone of its own, it was largely ignored in favor of other Android-based devices from Motorola and HTC. In this slideshow we'll take you back in time to trace the origins of the Android operating system and show how it rose rapidly to become one of the top operating systems in the mobile world.