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Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California,
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in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears,
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and Chris White.[20][21] Rubin described the Android project as having "tremendous potential in
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developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences".[21]
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The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras,
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and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004.[22]
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The company then decided that the market for cameras was not large enough for its goals,
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and five months later it had diverted its efforts and was pitching Android as a handset operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.[22][23]
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Rubin had difficulty attracting investors early on, and Android was facing eviction from its office space.
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Steve Perlman, a close friend of Rubin, brought him ${'$'}10,000 in cash in an envelope,
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and shortly thereafter wired an undisclosed amount as seed funding.
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Perlman refused a stake in the company, and has stated "I did it because I believed in the thing, and I wanted to help Andy."[24][25]
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In 2005, Rubin tried to negotiate deals with Samsung[26] and HTC.[27] Shortly afterwards,
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Google acquired the company in July of that year for at least ${'$'}50 million;[21][28]
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this was Google's "best deal ever" according to Google's then-vice president of corporate development,
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David Lawee, in 2010.[26] Android's key employees, including Rubin, Miner, Sears, and White,
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joined Google as part of the acquisition.[21] Not much was known about the secretive Android Inc. at the time,
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with the company having provided few details other than that it was making software for mobile phones.[21]
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At Google, the team led by Rubin developed a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel.
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Google marketed the platform to handset makers and carriers on the promise of providing a flexible, upgradeable system.[29]
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Google had "lined up a series of hardware components and software partners and signaled to carriers that it was open to various degrees of cooperation".[attribution needed][30]
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Speculation about Google's intention to enter the mobile communications market continued to build through December 2006.
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[31] An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard,
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but the arrival of 2007's Apple iPhone meant that Android "had to go back to the drawing board".[32][33]
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Google later changed its Android specification documents to state that "Touchscreens will be supported",
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although "the Product was designed with the presence of discrete physical buttons as an assumption,
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therefore a touchscreen cannot completely replace physical buttons".[34] By 2008,
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both Nokia and BlackBerry announced touch-based smartphones to rival the iPhone 3G, and Android's focus eventually switched to just touchscreens.
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The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, also known as T-Mobile G1, announced on September 23, 2008.[35][36]
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