Google's Android Phone Expected at Expo
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Several partner firms will demo prototypes of devices running Android at the Mobile World Congress, Google says.
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InfoWorld - Questions filled the air Monday as the mobile industry geared up for one of its biggest U.S. trade shows on Monday by focusing on entertainment.
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Details of Palm Inc.'s new smart phone are emerging ahead of the product's launch tomorrow.
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Will it be Google? Paul Allen? How about Qualcomm?
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What's in it for developers? Google invited developers to its London office for one of three workshops - the others being in Munich and Tel Aviv to spread the word and teach developers how to write for their new OS. Another event will be held in Boston on February 23rd (check at the blog for an announcement). Here's what they told us. The mantra for Android is that itâs "a complete and modern embedded OS, with a cutting edge mobile user experience, a world class software stack for building apps and open platform for developers users and industry". That of course breaks into lots of different specifics some of which are more solid than others. Computer people coming to mobile have a very different view of phone architecture to phone people adding features. Phone people see the phone functions - the GSM chipset, Bluetooth, DVB-H, for example, as a foundation, with drivers on top. Then there's an abstraction layer, an operating system, a user interface framework and the applications on top.â¦
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Google will come out in mid-2008 with a mobile phone platform that incorporates a variety of Google online services and lets outside developers create applications, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.The goal is to make Google applications and services as easily accessible on mobile phones as PCs, so that the company can extend its advertising business to cell phones and other wireless devices. Google may announce its mobile platform within weeks, according to the Journal.The Journal&#39;s article, based on anonymous sources, is the latest of multiple reports over the past six months or so about Google&#39;s plans for the mobile market.Although at some point it was speculated that Google might be involved in the actual&#160;manufacturing of phone hardware, that rumor is now discredited, as Google is expected to focus on developing mobile software.For Google, it&#39;s critical to replicate on mobile phones the success it has had on PC-based online advertising. After years of unfulfilled promises, mobile advertising will boom in coming years, as people spend more time using the Internet via their cell phones.The Kelsey Group recently forecast that mobile search and display advertising in the U.S. will hit $33.2 million this year and grow at a compound annual rate of 112 percent through 2012, when it will total $1.4 billion.Kelsey Group also expects the number of mobile Internet users to grow at a 20 percent compound annual clip in the U.S. through 2012, when there will be almost 92 million people going online via their cell phones.Worldwide, mobile ad spending is expected to reach $1.5 billion this year and grow to $11.3 billion by 2011, according to market researcher Informa Telecoms &amp; Media.Google is far from alone in its interest at pursuing this emerging opportunity in the mobile market, where all major telecom, online publishing and Internet players are jockeying for position.Of course, delivering online services and applications via mobile phones isn&#39;t as straightforward as doing it via PCs. In the mobile market, providers of online applications often have to strike up deals and partnerships with handset makers and wireless carriers.In a recent interview with the IDG News Service, Marissa Mayer, Google&#39;s vice president of Search Products &amp; User Experience,&#160;acknowledged there are specific challenges&#160;to bringing Google services to cell-phone subscribers.&quot;The mobile space is very complicated,&quot; she said.Google has pursued various avenues for making its search engines and other services available via cell phones. It has adapted Google Web sites for mobile browsers, developed mobile applications people can download themselves, as well as preloaded Google software in handsets via formal partnerships with mobile industry players.&#160;
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The first mobile phone fitted with Google's Android software platform has made its debut in Barcelona at one of the world's biggest telecom trade shows, Google said Monday.
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Web search leader Google Inc is expected to announce advanced software and services enabling handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by mid-2008, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
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Blog: The man behind the Palm Pilot has got a new mobile device to show off at the D: All Things Digital conference.
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InfoWorld - Google will come out in mid-2008 with a mobile phone platform that incorporates a variety of Google online services and lets outside developers create applications, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
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New mobile devices such as the iPhone and the OQO ultramobile PC pose compatibility and security challenges that IT managers will have to resolve, said attendees at a Gartner conference.
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A handful of chip makers showed Monday how a mobile device running Google Inc.'s Android operating system might look.
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Google&#39;s Android software platform for mobile phones&#160;is coming to life in Barcelona with a number of chip manufacturers showing it running on prototype or proof-of-concept phones at the Mobile World Congress on Monday.Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments all had Android on show. Most of them expect to see Android phones based on their chips on the market in the second half of this year.The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket. All were built around chips containing processor cores designed by Arm, a British fabless semiconductor company.One of the most polished prototypes is on the Texas Instruments stand -- although TI representatives insisted that it&#39;s just an example of how a finished product could look as the company only makes chips, leaving the development of phones to its customers. &quot;We don&#39;t do plastic,&quot; one said.TI actually had Android running on two different devices. One was based on its OMAP850, a single-chip device containing an application processor for Android and a baseband processor for controlling the phone&#39;s radio interface. The other contained TI&#39;s OMAP3430 multimedia application processor, capable of decoding high-definition television signals at a resolution of 720p. It requires a separate baseband processor, and is designed for high-end multimedia phones.Developing software for a new phone typically takes 14 to 18 months, said Ramesh Iyer, mobile Internet device product manager at TI. &quot;Android cuts that dramatically. It&#39;s a disruptor,&quot; he said.Google is shaking the market in other ways, Iyer said. &quot;Android is a single stack. You don&#39;t have to go looking for third-party solutions. Suddenly, they have defragmented the whole Linux ecosystem into one building block,&quot; he said.Android is entering an already crowded market for mobile phone software: To see how crowded, you only had to look at the NEC stand, where four prototypes containing its Medity2 processor were packed onto a narrow table. One was running Symbian OS, one Windows Mobile, one Android on top of Wind River Linux, and the last was running the same Wind River Linux but with a different application layer based on software from Trolltech and Esmertec.NEC staff expressed surprise at the level of interest in Android, saying they expected more attention for the completed phones based on the Medity2 at the next table. Manufactured for NTT DoCoMo, those phones contained the version of Linux promoted by the LiMo Foundation.The two systems are not necessarily in competition, though. With Android&#39;s focus on the application layer and Limo&#39;s work on the middleware, the underlying services needed to link applications to the Linux kernel, the two can be complementary, NEC staff said.Marvell took the prize for the most secretive Android demonstrations, refusing to allow photographs and declining even to say on which of its communications processors the software was running. The company showed a compact handset running the Android interface with a bare minimum of applications and a more complete installation playing video and browsing the Web on a bulky development board. Shrinking that down to a pocket-sized device will not take long, staff said. In fact, they had one ready -- just not loaded with the Android software.Android&#39;s Linux roots are likely to encourage the development of a wave of new handset applications, said Marvell&#39;s marketing director Vish Deshmane.&quot;You will see a lot more software to run on devices from people who want to exploit the commonality with desktop systems. It&#39;s going to be a boon for the 3G world because more applications means more data traffic, so operators will be happy,&quot; he said.Over at Freescale Semiconductor, staff showed Google Maps zooming in on the center of Barcelona on a development board built around Freescale&#39;s i.MX31 processor. This processor is not intended for mobile phones at all, and is more at home in GPS&#160;terminals or media players such as Toshiba&#39;s Gigabit and Microsoft&#39;s Zune.Qualcomm&#39;s demonstration of its 7201 combined baseband and application processor sparkled, but did not exploit the chip&#39;s full potential. The spinning globe of Android&#39;s Global Time application turned smoothly even without the assistance of the 3D graphics hardware acceleration, for which the drivers are not yet ready, said Rob Woodford.Android phones based on the chip will go on sale in the second half of this year, Woodford said -- but U.S. readers should contain their excitement: the Qualcomm display was overshadowed by a card warning that&#160;it may be prohibited from shipping the products on show to the U.S.&#160;because of a Dec. 31 court injunction obtained by chip rival Broadcom in a patent infringement case.The Mobile World Congress runs through Thursday at the Fira de Barcelona showground.
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While Google's Android SDK for mobile applications could become a formidable competitor to Sun's own Java platform, Sun vice president James Gosling said Wednesday it is not possible for Sun to take a position on Android.Speaking at the Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days conference at Sun headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., Gosling cited insufficient information from Google.?"It's impossible to have a position [on Android], right, because there is no data," he said when interviewed at the event. "Over the last couple of years, Google's been showing their phone at telecom conferences all over the world and with different business models, all of which really scared the carriers and handset makers. And then with Android, they put out a bag of code with no business model."Unless the day comes when they say what they're going to do with it, it's just a bag of code sitting out there," Gosling said.There has been speculation that Android, which leverages Java, could fragment the Java platform. Android was announced Nov. 5 by the Open Handset Alliance. This group features Google and other participants looking to foster innovation on mobile phones and offer a better consumer experience, according to a press statement.An Android SDK has leveraged both the Eclipse open source platform and Java classes. Android applications are written using the Java programming language, according to a Google FAQ about Android dated Dec. 14.Google could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.A speaker at Wednesday's conference, however, gave Android a thumbs-up."I like some of the capability in the Android platform," said Sean O'Sullivan, CTO of Rococo Software, who presented on Java Specification Request (JSR) 82 pertaining to Java APIs for Bluetooth. "In particular, I like the ability to customize lots of different elements within the Android platform."Sun, meanwhile, is moving Java ME (Micro Edition) technologies to smaller systems such as microcontrollers, while Java SE (Standard Edition) capabilities are due to be offered on newer cell phones with greater functionality, Sun officials said at the conference. Java SE capabilities are expected to be included in the planned JavaFX Mobile platform for cell phones and devices.Also at the event, Sun announced the open-sourcing of the Squawk virtual machine, which is a Java ME-compliant virtual machine used in the Sun SPOT platform. Other components of Sun SPOT, including libraries, will be open-sourced at a later date after more due diligence, said Roger Meike, director of operations in Sun Microsystems Labs, which has overseen the Sun SPOT project.Sun hopes by releasing Squawk, developers will extend it beyond mobile phones. Squawk and Sun SPOT are already being used in applications such as robotics.Also open-sourced by Sun at the conference was the JXTA (Juxtapose) Java ME MIDP2.0 Proxyless Implementation. JXTA allows for setting up ad hoc networks of devices such as phones for applications, including discovery of participants in a conference, said Mohamed Abdelaziz, lead architect within the advanced development group of Sun's Java client software group.O'Sullivan noted the Marge project, a framework to help developers build Bluetooth applications in Java, is intended to facilitate use of JSR 82.
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The first mobile phones fitted with Google's Android software platform made their debut at an industry trade show on Monday, a key advance in the struggle to bring the power of desktop computing to handsets.
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Qualcomm announced it will demonstrate a host of innovative 3G CDMA wireless products and solutions for consumers and the enterprise at CTIA Wireless IT &amp; Entertainment 2004, Oct. 25-27 in booth 638 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
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Android phones are finally reality, with Texas Instruments and others showing prototype handsets at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain.