Samsung Teaming Up With Skyhook Wireless, Too

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When Google first launched their mobile operating system entitled Android the world was taken by storm as we had never seen a open source mobile operating system with so much support behind it. One of the great things about an open source operating system such as Android is it gives hardware manufacturers the ability to utilize virtually any kind of software they want while assembling their phones. For instance, while Google provides the pseudo-turn-by-turn Maps application for every Android powered handset out of the box, handset manufacturers are not required to keep this software on the device.

If you’ll remember back in April we told you that Motorola would be ditching Google’s location based services in favor of Skyhook Wireless’ services. According to Motorola, this gave their lineup of devices much more precise and fully featured location based services than the ones provided by Google with Android out of the box.

It seems that Motorola isn’t the only popular handset manufacturer making the jump as Samsung recently issued a press release that lets us know that they will be heading to Skyhook Wireless for location based services with their handsets.  While it’s a known fact that Samsung has the Android powered Galaxy S handset, there was no mention of Google in the press release leading us to believe that Samsung will only be using Skyhook Wireless’ services on Bada-powered devices such as the Samsung Wave S8500.

As long as Microsoft never comes out with an Android powered device and starts swapping out the native mobile web browser for another not so popular mobile web browser such as Internet Explorer I’m all for these kind of choices. Not only does it make Android that much more of a capable operating system but it gives hardware manufacturers the ability to more precisely tune their devices to the needs of consumers before they ever hit the market.