android

Pocket-lint.co.uk have a series of shots up from the Mobile World Congress of ARM's android prototype. This is the same handset we saw a spy shot of before.

The early prototype that Pocket-lint was shown was running on the company's ARM 9 chip, two generations old, on a device that is unlikely to come to market, however that still didn't stop it performing incredibly quickly.

Although the interface will be fully customizable by the handset manufacturer, the prototype design we were shown featured a scroll bar of applications along the bottom of the screen.

The interface also had, as you'll see by the gallery of pictures, a very Apple feel to it, heavily graphical in its interface.

Meanwhile, OHA member Texas Instruments has announced it will unveil a couple of prototypes as well:

Today at Mobile World Congress, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) announced it will demonstrate an early look of the Android mobile platform in two forms: a prototype handset based on TI's OMAP850 processor that also includes TI's Wireless LAN (WLAN) and Bluetooth® wireless technology solutions, as well as an OMAP3430 processor-based Zoom Mobile Development Kit from Logic PD. Both demonstrations highlight the flexibility of the OMAP platform's multi-core architecture to deliver high-performance multimedia and sophisticated user interfaces (UI) on the Android platform.

Kinda anti-climactic, ain't it?

[via AndroidGuys]

Digitimes is reporting that HTC CEO Peter Chou recently told analysts that the company will be delivering 2-3 Android handsets this year, an estimate which just ambiguous enough to qualify as interesting tech news.

Google has extended the deadline for the Android Developer Challenge submissions, ostensibly in order to allow submitters to make use of a new SDK they'll be releasing sometime soon. From the official Android Developer blog:

Based on the great feedback you've given us, we've made significant updates to the SDK that we'll be releasing in several weeks. In order to give you extra time to take advantage of these forthcoming UI and API enhancements, we've decided to extend the submission deadline. In addition, a fair number of developers have also asked for more time to build and polish their applications.

Here is the updated time line:

April 14, 2008: Deadline to submit applications for judging
May 5, 2008: Announcement of the 50 first round winners, who will be eligible for the final round
June 30, 2008: Deadline for the 50 winners of the first round to submit for the final round
July 21, 2008: Announcement of the grand prize winner and runner-up

First the start of the Developer Challenge was delayed, and now the end is delayed as well. These guys have to get their shit together.

The Boston Business Journal is reporting that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be offering an Android-based course this semester, the school's Computer Science program's first Mobile-programming course.

The class... is being offered to students in the computer science major at MIT and is designed to give them an early edge in what could soon become a dominant platform among cell phone operating systems.

This is the sort of early endorsement Android needs more of. MIT is not only the school most associated with really hard-core tech geeks, but has a cool-ass logo as well.

The Android Developer's Blog has announced a number of "Android Code Days" taking place in major cities around the world. Munich Jan 29, London and Tel Aviv on Jan 31, Boston Feb 23.

What's a Code Day, you ask? Well, it's just our name for a day-long introduction and immersion session for Android. We'll give a technical introduction to the platform as well as a more in-depth look into topics of interest to the attendees. Then we'll have a free-for-all coding session that we like to call the "Laptop Lounge".

It's kinda like the .net CodeCamp I'll be at this coming weekend, except interesting.

The San Jose Mercury News has an article up highlighting more developer dissatisfaction with Android. This time a new cause for bitching, the as-yet-unrevealed nature of the source code, is the thrust of the compaints, although the good ole "buggy and lacks features" bit is brought out again as well.

As Google seeks to position itself to be the Microsoft of mobile by offering a free must-have operating system, it is running into Microsoft-style problems that could complicate the Mountain View company's efforts to expand into the mobile advertising market, which is expected to be $11 billion in just three years.

Even with the bugs and delays, I'm not sure just what's "Microsoft-style" about creating an open-source OS and giving it away.

This reads like manufactured news. Find a complaint that may or may not have some legitimacy, get a quote from somebody in the industry (usually an executive from a San Francisco start up; both SF start ups and their executives replicate like bacteria, so there's always one available and they'll usually say whatever you want), then package the whole thing up as news. The public's love affair with Google is slowly degenerating into reality ("He's realy nice and everything, but sometimes he'll wear the same pair of briefs for, like, four days in a row!"), so these not-is-all-right-inMountain-View stories are hot.

In other words: move along, there's nothing to see here.

Consider this quote, from a USA Today article that went up today:

Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's chief development officer, says Google's basic wireless goal is to use Android to better target ads to wireless customers so it can charge advertisers more.

By combining "unique information about consumers from the Web," he says, with "other information" from mobile devices, such as location, "Google believes search responses can be much more targeted for Google, and that the value they can bring back to advertisers can be quite a bit higher."

What is this quote telling us? That Google is a sneaky pubicly-traded bastard who woos us with the promise of a free, open, powerful mobile OS just so it can get its targeted-ad-enabling hooks into every aspect of our most personal electronic device. This is a dirty game they're playing: give us a free tool and monitor what we do with so as to make money off our good will. That Google's motives for creating and releasing Google are the same as they've been for every other tool they've created: offer us a valuable, powerful, and free service and through our use of that service compile data that it can use to generate ads that are more effectively targeted. Sounds like Google Search. Or Gmail. Or Google Reader.

History has shown that this is a win-win. Google has introduced services that have changed the landscape of the web and empowered users while turning them into a revenue-generating monolith of staggering proportions. And while there are valid privacy concerns engendered by this paradigm, Google has yet to either egregiously misuse the information it collects or allow a third, potentially malicious, party to do so (at least to my knowledge.)

Android is apparently not destined to be merely a pocketsized billboard, either. From elsewhere in the article:

Android won't favor Google over Yahoo and other search-engine rivals. [Brodman] says consumers also can "opt out" of Google's "cookies," used to track their movements on the Web.

The idea here is clear: put the technology first, offer a powerful product, and include the revenue generation as an opt-out component that is as unobtrusive as possible.

All right, I'm sounding like a fanboy. I'm no Sergey-lover, if that's what you're thinking. But I do think that Google (and Yahoo, and much of "Web 2.0") have developed a business model that someone with a distrust of overt capitalists and uberCorporations (like myself) can, tentatively, live with.

At first, I was thinking I would offer a review of Yahoo! Go 3.0. Ya know--load it up, try it out. Unfortunately, I've been informed that ver. 3.0 won't work on my phone, and the best I could do was 2.0, which is like hitting the dealership to pick up a new Porshe and only being able to afford the Yugo. And, btw, Yahoo's insistence that my phone is a T-Mobile Dash, rather than an HTC S621 as offered by Rogers Wireless, is just the sort of USA-centric assumption that really gets a Canadian's goat beaver.

So, then, I was going to riff on how everyone is casting Yahoo's announcement as some sort of direct shot at Google, an “Oh yeah?” response to Android, when really Yahoo Go was around before Android was ever announced and the new widget functionality is exactly in line with Yahoo's established practice of making the web more customizable for the user (Pipes, anyone?), but then I realized that I only had one extended sentence worth of content there and that it would be best drop it.

So here I am, left with no comment. Go check out Yahoo! Go 3.0. It looks cool.

The Techland Fortune/CNN Blog has an interview up with Android deity Andy Rubin (is ANDroid named that 'cause of him?) straight from the back-room dealings at CES. There are some great bits of info in there...

...On HTC producing the first Android phone:

Well I’m not sure if we said they would be first, but second half of 2008 is what we’re targeting for phones.

...On SDK bug-tracking:

In a couple of weeks we’ll have an online mechanism. We thought it was more important to get the SDK out there in developers hands first.

...On Android's lofty goals:

Software takes a lot of time to develop, and the software cost of a cell phone is about 20 percent. That is impacting consumers and making cell phones more expensive. The trickle-down effect is that it’s actually making data plans more expensive. By building a complete stack and having it be more open where there’s not a single vendor that’s selling it - we’re actually giving it away for free - we feel that it opens up the market in a way that benefits the consumers. It will make cell phones and data plans cheaper.

...On the issue of fragmentation:

If we’re worried about not fragmenting and not creating anything new then we’d still be using tubes in our radios and you’d have to warm up the TV.

It's a short interview, but action-packed.

So it seems like the first big Android-related news to come out of CES is this Wistron NeWeb GW4 linux-rocking smartphone that Slashgear was all over a couple of days ago.

The feature list sounds close to what I've been waiting for: WiFi, touchscreen, bluetooth, full QWERTY. No word on GPS or what kind of expansion memory it accepts, however, and it doesn't even offer EDGE (hurtin'). Honestly, I don't find it as ugly as a lot of other commentators do, especially not the white version which has a clean, spare, sharp-edged kinda look (like a nice SUSE desktop). It looks quite like my beloved HTC S621.

The hype is around the fact that it's running a Linux 2.6 kernel, which makes it ideal for a little Android action down the road.

But who is Wistron NeWeb Corporation? Where did these guys come from? Well, Taiwan, apparently. I've never heard of them, but a year ago I'd never heard of HTC, either. As their website proclaims, they ake all kinds of stuff. In fact, the list includes basically every variety of electronic device yet conceived by God or man. And, if you're looking for a good time, check out their about page, which reads like the bizarre love-child of an undergrad business paper and the back of an instant noodle package.

[via AndroidGuys]