Android was influenced by all of these prior efforts, at least indirectly. I was at Orange prior to Android getting started (and before Miner left to join Rubin).
At Orange we had built apps for Symbian S60, UIQ, and windows mobile. We also had seen the limitation of these platforms, especially Symbian which was getting long in the tooth with its baroque memory management architecture. I personally had seen the limitations of trying to get something working on Series 60 working directly with Nokia Engineers and getting held up by the platform limitations (and Nokia's own internal issues).
Another player at that time was Savaje - they had built a completely java based phone OS and were trying to sell it to carriers. Unfortunately they were too early to the market (among other issues).
So Rich had seen all of these issues with early smart phone systems and the European smartphone ecosystem, and presumably applied some of the learnings to Android's development.
At Orange we had built apps for Symbian S60, UIQ, and windows mobile. We also had seen the limitation of these platforms, especially Symbian which was getting long in the tooth with its baroque memory management architecture. I personally had seen the limitations of trying to get something working on Series 60 working directly with Nokia Engineers and getting held up by the platform limitations (and Nokia's own internal issues).
Another player at that time was Savaje - they had built a completely java based phone OS and were trying to sell it to carriers. Unfortunately they were too early to the market (among other issues).
So Rich had seen all of these issues with early smart phone systems and the European smartphone ecosystem, and presumably applied some of the learnings to Android's development.