Larry Page: Jobs is rewriting history

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Briefing Thursday at the Allen & Co's Sun Valley conference, Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin told reporters that Steve Jobs had changed Android's history to suit Apple's (AAPL) interests. He contended that Google had been working on Android long before the iPhone was introduced.

Page said,

"We had been working on Android a very long time, with the notion of producing phones that are Internet enabled and have good browsers and all that because that did not exist in the marketplace. I think that characterization of us entering after [the iPhone was introduced] is not really reasonable."

According to a former Apple employee, the day that the Apple-Google relationship started to crumble was the introduction of the T-Mobile G1. According to him, Steve Jobs and Apple Mobile Software VP Scott Forstall had only seen Android prototypes that looked like Blackberries. The new form factor was 'way too similar to the iPhone for Jobs' tastes'.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said,"Google and Apple still have important partnerships in various businesses, and stressed that the market was big enough for both Google's Android and Apple's iPhone to be successful."

However, Schmidt also said that Google's ChromeOS would not only be entering the market later this year in NetBook form factor, it would also be released as a tablet, competing directly against Apple's popular iPad.

- tech.fortune.cnn.com Inputs

Larry Page: Jobs is rewriting history