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Google Announces "Open Phone" Coalition, No gPhone [Updated]
Ponca City, We Love You writes "USA Today has an advance story on Google's plans to announce a new operating system, geared specifically for cellphones with partners that include Sprint, Motorola, Samsung and Japanese wireless giant NTT DoCoMo. Although details won't be released until later today the new G-system will be based on Linux overlaid with Java and Google hopes to have a branded device ready for worldwide shipment by spring. Mobile Web browsing is notoriously slow and Google plans to change that by providing easy access to the Internet at PC-type speeds. Google plans to basically give away the software developer tools, used by programmers to write new applications. "If you're a developer, you'll be able to develop (applications) for the new Google Phone very quickly," said Morgan Gillis of the LiMo Foundation. AT&T and Verizon Wireless are noticeably absent from the coalition not wanting to support a device that favors Google over other providers. Sprint, the No. 3 carrier, supports the coalition, but it hasn't formally agreed to make the Google Phone available to its 54 million subscribers." Update 1727 GMT by SM: It's official, Google is releasing the mobile "Android" OS in place of the Google branded mobile phone that many expected.
It's not that Sun is depreciating JavaME. But that JavaME and JavaSE will merge. More detail on this from James Golsing's blog entry.
Here is the actual Open Handset Alliance Website describing Android. Third party developers will have access to all the hardware capabilities and software libraries that the Google software has access to. So developers can do anything that the phone is technically capable of. I imagine it will be fairly easy for end users to load new software onto the phone.
Keep in mind that the quote about favoring Google applications and services is from the LiMo foundation, which is trying to produce their own Linux-based cellphone platform. The Open Handset Alliance claims the exact opposite: "Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services. With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests. They can swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos."