Google to Steve Jobs - we thought of it it first!

One of Google's founders has hit back at Apple boss Steve Jobs' comments that the company followed Apple into the smartphone market. In an exchange which is starting to resemble a playground dialogue, Google co-founder Larry Page insisted that despite what Jobs says, Google thought of it first.

Jobs has gone on record a couple of times with the opinion that as Apple is not elbowing its way into the search business, Google should stay clear of smartphones... although quite how having thought of it first gives Apple any kind of right to decide who enters the smartphone business is not clear.

Page, meanwhile, maintains that Jobs' claim that the iPhone came before Android just isn't true, and is accusing Apple's top man of 'a little bit of rewriting history'.  "We had been working on Android a very long time, with the notion of producing phones that are Internet enabled and have good browsers and all that because that did not exist in the marketplace," Page commented. "I think that characterization of us entering after is not really reasonable."

Of course, the first iPhone was unveiled in January 2007, a good ten months before Google announced the Android OS that November, but as with the playground argument, there is very little proof of who thought of doing smartphones first. Google can point to the fact that it purchased the mobile startup Android Inc as early as 2005 - an acquisition which will have informed Google's OS, even if it didn't represent the start of Android development. However its argument is weakened by comments from its VP engineering at a developers conference, which suggested that Google developed Android in order to avoid a 'Draconian future' where 'one man, one company and one device' would be our only choice - suggesting that Android development was indeed a reaction to Apple's activities.