Rubin, who was a maniacal robot aficionado—he would haunt the Akihabara district of Tokyo for weird Japanese toys, and build a few of his own—called the company Android. He gathered a team of eight to begin working on a prototype. He had a good contact at the handset manufacturer HTC, which provided him with a top-secret new device that he could use just for demos. After a few months, Android had a working model with a set of slick features such as contacts, email, and a camera. (One nice touch was that Android’s photo software could recognize faces.)
