""Everybody talks about fragmentation as a bad thing, but I think you need to look at it from the perspective of the developer," Eric Chu, Google's group manager for Android mobile platforms, told the wireless-happy OpenMobileSummit in downtown San Francisco this afternoon. "How much work does the developer have to do to address the fragmentation? If there are a million devices and they're in three fragments, they don't care.
"Chu says that although HTC and Motorola have tweaked the Android UI on the Hero and Cliq devices respectively, the underlying platform remains the same. "There are clear opportunities for manufacturers and carriers to differentiate in terms of the look and feel of the UI - the look and feel of the device - while keeping the underlying platform consistent so that developers don't have to do anything different."
