Slashdot Mirror
Google's Open Source Mobile Platform
As expected, today Google took the wraps off of the gPhone (as the media have for months been referring to the rumored project). Google is "leading a broad industry alliance to transform mobile phones into powerful mobile computers," and will be licensing its software to all comers on an open source basis under the Apache license. (The Wall Street Journal's Ben Worthen demonstrates a miserable grasp of what "open source" means.) Google's US partners include Nextel and Sprint, but not AT&T nor Verizon. Phones will be available in the second half of 2008 — not the spring as earlier reports had speculated. News.com's analysis warns that Google won't take over the mobile market overnight, though they quote Forrester in the opinion that Google may be one of the three biggest mobile players after several years of shakeout.
Goatse is announce its Open Sores Mobile Anus Platform featuring all of your favorite Slashdot editors
coming to a town near you soon!!
sign up now
consumers will be the winners because it's a serious competitor to at&t and their outrageous charges, it opens up the possiblity of an adsense supported phone, and because google is doing it microsoft will do it giving us even more competition.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Ok, so not reading the article I get, who has the time. I am getting used to people not reading the summary either. But not reading the title of the article is just too much! Thats it, you are expelled from slashdot!
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
For the past 3 days I've been trying to modify and mess with my Motorola V3M Razor and it's a glitchy hell to try and do. Any phone that's more open than the current phone Nazis keep them is fine with me. All those dollar per ringtone and wallpaper people can shove it. Oh and especially that chick on late night TV commercials with the weird accent telling me I can win like $32,000 if I unscramble the word and text it in. I hope Google tracks her down and gets her deported. Now some of you may be asking, "Do you have anger issues with cell phone carriers and their associates" to which I say, "Don't you?"
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
You read the article I take it?
Viruses need to self replicate.
Social Enginnering 'OMG Download this cool app d00dz' doesnt count.
There arent any easy ways to get a phone to send a virus to another phone.
The easiest way is Bluetooth or Wifi and then its still a pain in the ass to make it spread.
With Bluetooth you first need to somehow get another phone to connect to you, without user intervention which is impossible (without flaws in the stack).
Then you need to send data to the other phone in a way which makes it execute the code. Also basically impossible.
Whats the chance of Google's code having fundamental bugs like that? Nil.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Let me be the first to say DUPE.
Come ON! I guess Slashdot's speed at getting the original post on the front page threw you guys off. Usually these things come at least a day after everyone else.
(Not that I don't prefer Slashdot. I flame because I care.)
I think thats a bit harsh. He didnt even use the term 'open source', he just said 'open' and clarified what he meant by it, which is that anyone can write software for it, which is true (contrast that to the pre-SDK iPhone). I think his concern is a valid one. You could imagine a malicious application on the phone that uses Bluetooth to detect other phones nearby and spam them with SMS messages or something. But I'm sure google's thought of this and there will be security mechanisms, permissions, signed applications with digital certificates etc. etc.
It's still just a client device. Somehow I was hoping for a much bolder stroke from google, like if they'd bought up that new spectrum, thrown in their own fiber backbone, and used it to change the cellco/customer relationship fundamentally. So long as they're working through the same old networks, the US cellphone industry will stay pretty much as-is.
> What sets this platform apart form the rest?
The license, and the license fee. Plus, I'll bet, the development environment.
Max.
...welcome our Android overlords.
Good. With that out of the way, I have to say I'm really looking forward to seing what Google can do in terms of getting functionality that has typically been the domain of "smartphones" that typically go for more than $200 w/ contract into the domain of phones that range from free to $50 (again w/ contract). With the minimum requirements set at an ARM9 @ 200MHz, this platform should allow open development on a huge new range of phones. I've already seen people earlier today making dire predictions about how Google is not going to be able to compete with the iPhone or how they prefer phones based on Symbian...and I think these people are completely missing Google's whole plan. I'm sure that initially phones based on Android will fall closer to the smartphone price range, but I can't help but think that eventually Google has to be aiming at the free-to-$50 phones. The "just a basic phone" market is an area in desperate need of a unifyied platform. Between lack of openness and the lack of a properly standardized Java implementation development for a wide range of low end phones is pretty much intractible. If Google can get Android onto low-cost phones *and* ensure "write once, run anywhere" between them I think they will have all the developer support they need. And since they already have the ears of the carriers (T-Mobile, Sprint, etc) they've already ensured they have a way to get this on shipping phones.
Why do I think low end phones are so important to these companies in the open handset alliance, when they don't have the profit margins of smartphones or "feature-phones"? Simple: Emerging markets. For billions of people around the world it is too expensive or impractical to own and maintain an Internet connected PC. It may be because of upfront cost or it may be a lack of Internet infrastructure in their area. For those people a phone will be their first (and maybe only) connection to the Internet. Right now the browsing experience on basic phones ranges from useless to unbearably slow and there is an impressive *lack* of easily accessible third party applications. If someone could change that it would add incredible value to that class of phones. So what's in it for Google? Making sure that their page is the first one a couple billion people see the first time they get on the Internet is probably worth it.
^I'm with stupid.^
And it should also be easy to build a Beowulf cluster of these phones.
No, it's not at all harsh for what is supposed to be a professional writer. He starts off with an idea, a dangerous beginning in the first place, that there should be some sort of software security specifically for interfacing phones and PCs in the office. A good idea (perhaps even a profitable one) and doesn't think it through at all. He starts off, not with the good idea, but with a broad, one-sided assumption that all open applications are prone to security issues simply because they are open. If he were somewhere in the ballpark range of competent he would have reversed the two topics and stated that we need security software for smart phone to PC interfaces and that the result of not developing it could be rogue open applications creating a security nightmare. But he didn't. He speculated on something that went well in hand with his idea, but he didn't have a clue about it worked, and also didn't do any research on it to get more knowledge. He even pretty much says all this (sans admitting that he doesn't know what he's talking about and didn't do any research, but that much is very obvious) in his rehash he added to the article to address the people who e-mailed him about his mistake. The update is almost as large as the article itself. I'd say he pretty much deserves to be criticized on his grasp of Open Source as it is demonstrated by this article.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
HTC, one of the partners, makes a ton of great phone hardware, currently held back by the crappy Windows Mobile software it's running; I'd expect that a lot of that hardware will run Android in the future.
I don't have any experience with Sprint but T-Mobile is probably the best in terms of being "open" of the big four mobile operators in the US. For example, until a few years ago you could get free web browsing through them by exploiting a hole in their free WAP access service. Instead of just shutting the hole and ignoring the people who didn't want to pay for a full Internet plan, they decided to shut it while transitioning to tiered Internet plans so people who didn't need to tether could still get the full web on their phones at a reduced price. Most phones also apparently will still let you tether with their cheap service, though T-Mobile will cut off your access if you use too much bandwidth while doing this.
They use GSM which is a big plus if you want to buy your own phone. I haven't yet needed to because, while all of their phones that I've owned were locked and had T-Mobile logos and "premium services" everywhere, none of them were in any way crippled like Verizon is infamous for doing. I even added a custom ringtone to one of my phones using only a standard USB cable and the manufacturer's ringtone transfer software. Their coverage is pretty good, the only time I've had trouble with it was when I was traveling through West Virginia which is a hard area to cover with cell phone service anyways. Their biggest problem is that they don't yet have any 3G service available anywhere (they're waiting for the spectrum they bought for it to become available for their use) and their customer service is nothing to write home about, but that's pretty much par for the course in this industry.
What if this signature were clever?
So I suppose instead of hot spots if you have a gPhone you look for gSpots....
Bent Cardan says: Too bad about the gphone. Why can't they make their operating system open and protected like OS X?
Google have been running (on a small scale) something conceptually similar in Japan with one of the major carriers -- KDDI -- for a while now. KDDI have integrated google search as the default search system, and google mail as one of the "official" mail options for that service. In effect there is a KDDI co-branded Google.
/.
As far as I see it, Google mobile platform is the same thing inside an OS package. The platform will be "open" to carriers and makers who are participants of the Google alliance. However, nowhere in the Google materials have i seen a commitment to make the phone open to the outside developers. Nor does it make any sense for them to open it.
Depending on how it is rolled out, we may see some sources, but likely we'll never have a chance to apply a patch to the OS actually in the device, or build an application outside of whatever sandbox they put in the OS. There will likely be APIs and widgets tied to the google servers and services, but hardly much freedom beyond that.
Obviously that is very good for google, if they pull it off. It is less obviously good for the carriers or the makers, but the carriers will eventually agree to this in exchange for revenue-sharing, and because they have nowhere to go, and the makers will be arm-twisted by the carriers. The end result may be that only the "google internet" will be available on the mobile phones that use android. Sorta like an enhanced WAP, imode or EZ web.
I see no problem with this if one is very-very happy about storing their data on a google server and accessing it via the google phone OS. But I wouldn't call it free in any of the senses of that word we're accustomed to on
But I guess we'll see what it really is when they release the SDK.
I don't think they'll take over the mobile market overnight, either. I think it'll take at least a few weeks.
After all, who would want an open standard phone where you can install your own software and not be charged a buck for a text message or a ringtone? Who the fuck would want that?
expandfairuse.org
Google has never called it the "gPhone"; Bloggers and press came up with that name since they needed to call it something. Google's name for the platform is Android.
What does this mean for OpenMoko?
"I can't buy want I want because it's free. Can't be what they want because I'm me." -Corduroy, Pearl Jam
This guy is so clueless, his Betamax VCR is still flashing 12:00...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Sprint and Nextel is one company. Sprint acquired Nextel.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
First, it's a blatant rewrite in at least a few places -- while I saw what he was trying to say, maybe, it was worded so horribly wrong that I'd be amazed if it wasn't intentional.
"Google's operating system is open, meaning anyone can write software for it."
Yeah, that's not at all implying that it's about an open platform (vs iPhones locked down one), and not about an open source platform.
But more importantly, he's assuming that cell phone viruses are somehow new with this phone, and that they will somehow cause problems for a corporate network, and that the way to deal with it is anti-virus.
This is wrong on all counts. Cell phone (and mobile) viruses are not new, though they've never been widespread. They generally don't jump to desktop machines -- the corporate network should be safe. And generally, no one's stupid enough to run anti-virus software on Linux, and very few on the Mac -- even on Windows, the usefulness of anti-virus is questionable.
So, your IT guy might freak out -- but really, you've got a much higher risk of getting hit by some road warrior bringing his laptop back into the company network (from Starbucks or whatever).
So that's two for two. Spam him again. Any chance he'll write an update that isn't pure bullshit?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Are you kidding? He's fast approaching the Ideal Slashdot User, who to this point has only been simulated mathematically - he who reads nothing at all.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
I dunno... it really strikes me a lot like a number of the software standard alliances that Sun and the other Unix vendors tried to put together or participate in over the years. They always full apart because nobody's interests aligned in any lasting way and everybody had a bad case of NIH ("Not Invented Here").
I'm not saying none have worked, but I am asking honestly - how many technology projects with even half as many partners have actually succeeded in producing a stable platform? It seems to me that the truly successful open source projects have always been independent of any corporate interests - Linux succeeded in making a standard Unix-like platform where years of Dec / Sun / IBM / HP alliances failed and the business interests that have been successful with Linux have done so by learning to support efforts where there was already community leadership instead of trying to dictate a direction to the platform. Netscape did okay, I guess, but that wasn't a big business alliance and hasn't exactly been an exemplar of efficient platform production.
I'm just not seeing that this is a big deal, except that everybody thought that something much more exciting was actually going to happen.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Both Nokia and Google have announced iPhone-killers and neither of them is going to ship one unit before the second half of 2008. Microsoft will need at least that long to shrink Surface down to the size of a Zune.
Nokia is promising touchscreens and multimedia and Google is promising open source and the Web. Like we already have in our iPods. And they're going to get that to us real soon now. Like in another year from now.
It shows how miserable Palm has become that Google didn't even buy them. Not even for the name.
You will have to forgive me for it being 7 AM, I may not be as irrational as normal ;)
:)
How did this guy get a job as writer for the "Business Technology" of "The Wall Street Journal" ? It's fairly obvious he doesn't know anything about technology. Open? I do not really expect the gPhone to be open to consumers like a linux PC is open to it's user. A bit more customizable then Windows Mobile, likely, but not anywhere near OpenMoko. The point it seems he is trying to make is that the phone is open in the way that everyone can make software for it. HTC makes devices running Windows Mobile I have absolutely no trouble writing applications for. And indeed, Windows Mobile isn't really open, but if you take a stroll down PPC hacker lane, you'll find that very little is sacred and most things (outside of normal application scope) are not that hard to tap into. It would not be difficult (at least for me, and I'm not a _seasoned_ WM developer) to write virus like or security breaching applications for those phones, and they've been around for what, 5 or 6 years now?
I guess (and purely a guess, as I haven't even been to the US) for you Americans the real problem is BlackBerry. It steals a lot of the thunder of the current top of the line mobile phones, because it offers similar functionality (be it in an outdated, obsolete and rediculously expensive way), but it is one of the dominant brands. Over here in Europe, where I live, carriers are nice, and everybody and their grandma has a WM-PPC; if not their primary pub-phone, then their work-related phone. I'd be surprised if 1 out of a 100 even ever heard of BlackBerry
In the context of TFA, there is nothing new or even relatively new to the gPhone. I would almost go as far as to say there is nothing 'new' about the gPhone at all - yeah, let's get a bunch of companies together and form and alliance with all the control, then call it open, while it probably isn't really open for end-users, just for the buzz-factor. It's not like we don't have enough 'open' mobile device alliances already. And Google really does seem to be becoming the new microsoft, it's eerie! I Not that I think Windows Mobile is the best thing since sliced bread, performance/power wise it's way lacking compared to Symbian, but nevertheless, it is a really nice platform.
Obligatory OpenMoko disclaimer; sure OpenMoko may be the shit, but the device simple doesn't fit my hardware needs. It's so horribly two years ago.
It's not the 'openness' of the platform that matters. It's the openness of the end-product, that is delivered to the customer [namely you and me] that matters [well, to you and me]. And that's an issue that's pretty much independent of what OS the phone is running. Particularly in the US.
And Sprint being part of this 'group' means nothing w.r.t. how open the shipping product will be.
The US wireless carriers will fight tooth and nail to NOT be treated as what they are: wireless service providers.
On the other hand, if anything this could make customer demand for 'openness' more difficult, because this fractures the market for developers a bit more. Now, to develop a ubiquitous app, you need to support another platform. One that with the source available, developers can't necessarily count on a given set of API's even being available on a 'googleos' phone...
I think it'll still take quite a while before the US wireless carriers permit much advancement. Even Apple had to deliberately cripple iTunes support on the iPhone so you can't use it over your "unlimited data plan" EDGE connection.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Nope, it's Linux based, and any add-on Google writes will be under the Apache license. The video also seemed to indicate that linux hackers will be comfortable in the system, as well. Compared to just having some crap Java virtual machine, this could be huge. Hacked iPhones made rapid progress partly because they run real *-nix, and Apache was ported before any of the traditional toy web servers, and SSH before telnet, and even a VNC viewer (with a somewhat broken control interface). I guess we'll see in about a week what's under the hood.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Well if it does end up being called a gPhone, I reckon it'll hit Apple right in the iSpot.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
First, look at the guys forming the "alliance": Broadcom, NVIDIA, Wind River, who are all acting towards closing linux (Wind River was even a vocal opponent to linux some times ago). Furthermore, look at why they choose Android's licence:
Why did you pick the Apache v2 open source license? Apache is a commercial-friendly open-source license. The Apache license allows manufacturers and mobile operators to innovate using the platform without the requirement to contribute those innovations back to the open-source community. Because these innovations and differentiated features can be kept proprietary, manufacturers and mobile operators are protected from the "viral infection" problem often associated with other licenses.
There. You can dream all you want about an open platform, like your traditional Fedora or Ubuntu desktop, but that won't be it. Go for Openmoko instead.
I was wondering what had prompted Apple to suddenly go out and publish the iPhone SDK. Now I get it - they don't want to risk letting developers flee to Android and miss potential killer apps.
Now let's see what comes out of Android. It can't be any worse than most current phone OSs anyways.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
OK, OK, I know we're only supposed to speculate here without actually knowing anything. But if you want to know about it, it's here. It does use a Linux kernel (how then can it be 'Apache Licence'?). Above the kernel it is running a custom virtual machine, which doesn't seem to be a JVM. 'Android', as well as being the name of the project, is the name of a company bought by Google last year which specialised in PDA operating systems; The SDK will be ready for download on 12th November.
Before they were Android, the people behind the product were Danger, and produced a phone/PDA called HipTop, which was largely Java based.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I have been thinking about the use of Linux on smartphones and one of the conclusions that I came to, rightly or wrongly, is that there is a major licensing problem in the interface between the GPL software in GNU/Linux and the hardware and software employed in a telephony module, to the point that there is a fear that GPL software touching a telephony module would cause the telephony software to become unacceptably open, either from the point of view of business or regulatory authorities, and this is why there is no POTS option for Nokia's Internet Tablet range, and indeed why the iPhone is locked down. OpenMoko has broken this taboo, and will be a major advance in opening the telephony market *if* it passes FCA and European certification - there is no guarantee of this.
To this end I believe that the Google telephony platform will, in its early stages at least, be a GNU/Linux OS running on an ARM processor or similar with a closed interface to the telephony systems, and with Google Gears and a Java for Mobile Telephony, which may or not be the current Mobile Java, as the developer interfaces. There would still be no direct access to the phone module, and only the only open network access would be over wi-fi unless Google manages to obtain its own pieces of the spectrum across the world or can form deals with phone providers... hmm, does that sound familiar?
Right now in the UK for example, I can only see one provider even considering allowing the sort of access that Google would want, and that's the one that has no long distance infrastructure of its own and has just introduced a Skype phone that works over its network, partially to reduce its interconnect costs.
Then again, as most European 3G licences will be about halfway through their life when the OS becomes available, and with the licence holders finally coming to terms with the fact that uptake is being delivered by access to data rather than blocky film clips, the promise of a share of Google's revenues might be enough to encourage the phone providers to open up - a little at least.
This is all empirical but it's what the current state of telephony looks like from the view of an interested spectator. Feel free to correct me.
Symbian and the iPhone are successful because they don't try to fit an inappropriate interface to the devices. Obligatory OpenMoko disclaimer; sure OpenMoko may be the shit, but the device simple doesn't fit my hardware needs. It's so horribly two years ago. It's something which has the potential to revolutionise particularly business applications and processes.
Deleted
He isn't talking about open source. He's talking about it being an open platform like Windows or BSD instead of locked down like game consoles are and the iPhone tried to be. Is the difference really that incomprehensible?
Its all in the eye of the beholder then, as in my experience all mobile phones available in the UK are glitchy. I have not ever used a phone where I have thought the menus or features (like button presses!) responded in a timely manor - but they have gained colour screens and higher res, but they are still awful to use. And they've gained the startup and shutdown times of a fucked install of Windows 98! But people will live with and defend shit when they have paid a lot of money for it...
I haven't seen a recent phone (since the advent of 2 or 2.5G phones) that doesn't lock up or become unusable over time. Discussing this with people, some have tried to counter this statement, but I have discovered that the people who think that their phone doesn't crash tend to be the people who fiddle with their phone all the time (like disassembly/assembly), or they tend to forget to charge it regularly, so the phone does get power cycled sometimes.
My nokia sometimes need power cycling sometimes because I'll plug in the charger, and even though the battery should be nearly dead, it'll say "battery full". Unfortunately I have been conditioned by too much use of Windows that my line of thought is "if in doubt, reboot", so when my phone does this I just reboot it. I don't want my phone to not charge because the software is being retarded.
A mate's got a new touch screen sony thing, and it doesn't notice when outgoing calls are made, but only sometimes! This is a basic fucking feature with a huge bug..... It may be addressable, but it'd mean jumping through hoops no doubt to correct.
I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but to say phones aren't glitchy is simply wrong! But if they didn't have annoyances then people would have reasons to ever "upgrade".
An open platform (and I hope it is actually properly open, not marketing speak "open") would hopefully open a route for the development of phone software that isn't like a horrible bespoke proprietry application you might see at a business: you know the kind of shit I mean, VB front ends to access databases or IE only active-X intranet sites. Awful to use, but the only way of getting stuff done.
Car analogies break down.