Oh Google, you disappoint us. We thought you were above this, but no. The latest disassembly of Android has unearthed icons for the Android Marketplace showing, yep, tawdry ringtones and wallpapers will soon be on sale.
We expect ringtones for the iPhone from iTunes, but seriously, we thought Google would be above it, and worse still it seems ringtones will be paid-for downloads, using Google’s Checkout service.
Unearthed by Phandroid, the two icons were found in Android’s internal image libraries, showing up as ringtones.png and wallpapers.png.
The Google Checkout icons meanwhile, hint that the Big G will use its own payment back-end to handle sales through the Android Marketplace.
There’s no direct confirmation that Google will be selling ringtones and wallpapers itself, although it’s hard to see why they’ve bothered to create dedicated icons for these items, and not others, if it’s not at least mulling the idea over.
We’d hoped super-smart phones like the iPhone, BlackBerry Storm and T-Mobile G1 would escape the clutches of ringtone salesmen, wawking the modern-day equivalent of snake oil. After all, the G1′s perfectly capable of playing back MIDI and MP3 files itself. There’s no reason owners should pay for their wares at all.
Still, if nothing else it means T-Mobile G1 owners will have more choice than simply paying Jamster £4 per week, and that at least is a good thing.
