Android has quickly become the most dominant mobile operating system in the world. Thanks to its freeware strategy, Google has been able to push Apple on its heels and crush Blackberry and Microsoft’s mobile platforms. But it turns out that Android’s founder envisioned a world of “smart cameras” with Android at its core, rather than smartphones.

Speaking at an economic summit in Tokyo, Android co-founder Andy Rubin had the following to say about Android’s roots.

“The exact same platform, the exact same operating system we built for cameras, that became Android for cellphones.”

Rubin believed Android would be used to connect smart cameras to PCs and you would store your photos in the cloud. At the economic summit, Rubin even showed slides of his first pitch to investors from 2004, including one that showed a camera connected to an “Android Datacenter.”

Growth in the digital camera market started to slow, so Rubin and his team quickly changed their plans and began pitching Android as an open source handset solution in 2005.

“We decided digital cameras wasn’t actually a big enough market. I was worried about Microsoft and I was worried about Symbian, I wasn’t worried about iPhone yet.”

Just imagine, you could be using a Blackberry still if Rubin kept gunning for cameras. Apple launched the iPhone two year later and started to quickly capture the U.S. smartphone market. But thanks to an acquisition by Google, Android quickly caught up ground and now powers more smartphones than any other platform on the planet.

• SourcePC World